Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work - Hardcover

Townley, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803984936 ISBN 13: 9780803984936

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this book reconceptualizes the field of human resource management (HRM) and explores an alternative politics and ethics of work.

The central thesis is that personnel/HRM techniques play a crucial role in constituting the self, in defining the nature of work, and in organizing and controlling the workforce. Human resource management, it is argued, comprises a nexus of disciplinary practices - a technology of power - aimed at making employees' behaviour and performance predictable and calculable, in a word, `manageable'.

The author analyzes a wide range of HRM procedures, including job evaluation and ranking, selection, appraisal and self-assessment, relating these to Foucauldian concepts of taxinomia, mathesis, examination and confession. The book concludes by linking Foucauldian and feminist ideas to sketch a potentially emancipatory and ethical agenda for HRM.

About this title

Review

`[Townley] presents an important and distinctive contribution to our understanding of these domains in a manner that is remarkably accessible given her Foucauldian approach.... Townley's analysis is a welcome, challenging and timely addition - even though many occupational psychologists may feel rather uncomfortable with her perspective since it conceptualises HRM as a fallible information panopticon.... The considerable strengths of this book are rooted in its accessibility, originality and topicality. Townley certainly meets her objective of reconceptualizing the field of HRM/Personnel in order to explore an alternative politics and ethics of work. In doing so she succeeds in exposing and disrupting the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin ostensibly neutral HRM/Personnel practices and thereby casts them in a new light.... Despite being haunted by the spectre of relativism, Townley's book represents a learned contribution to our understanding of issues rarely confronted in `normal' HRM texts. It presents a critique that eschews the conservative disinterestedness of much of the postmodernist genre through its exploration of how the status quo might be changed through political action. As such it should be of considerable reflexive value to academics, students, consultants and practising managers. By disrupting what we often take for granted, Townley helps us reflect upon the assumptions and values that we routinely deploy in making sense of our worlds and thereby hopefully change them' - The Occupational Psychologist

`This reframing of HRM makes an important contribution to the debate on the philosophy of its function and contains an extensive review of the literature to support its claims. This book will be of primary interest to those engaged in this debate but will also provide food for thought for the professional practitioner.... this book presents a thoughtful and provocative stirring of the pot and is a most welcome addition to the HRM literature' - Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology

`It is an interesting attempt to apply Foucauldian analysis to a particular aspect of organizational functioning, and a welcome addition to the critical literature on HRM' - Organization Studies

About the Author

Barbara Townley is Associate Professor in the Department of Organizational Analysis, University of Alberta, Canada. She has taught HRM and industrial relations at the Universities of Lancaster and Warwick and is author of Labour Law Reform in US Industrial Relations (1986).

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0803984936
• ISBN 13: 9780803984936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224