Critical Human Resource Development

A critical turn in human resource development This issue will comprise a number of papers relating to a series of themes on critical human resource development. The editors proposed the theme due to their concern that the debates and practice of human resource development (HRD) were being dominated by an unquestioning performativity or an assumption of benign humanism. Many practitioners in the “management and human resource development business” have long felt their role was dubious if they merely operated in a technocratic way – refining individual skills and developing organisational capabilities to continue operating in ways that have serious human and ecological consequences. In the background, a number of practitioners and academics have been quietly working with critical approaches to learning and development and have built up a degree of experience of the possibilities, dangers and constraints of critical HRD. The aim of this issue is to collate lessons from this experience in a critically reflexive way. It is about critical HRD, in the sense of going beyond a simplistic unquestioning advocacy of HRD theory and practice. Since the mid-1980 s, Britain has seen increased exhortations to improve its development of managers, including the Constable and McCormick (1987) Report, Handy’s (1987) Report, the Mangham and Silver Report (1986), and more recently the Institute of Management’s report (Thomson et al., 1997) and the Storey, Edwards and Sisson (1997) study. Invariably, the rationale for development is to better pursue competitive advantage, to “meet the changing character of market conditions” (Storey, Edwards and Sisson, 1997, p. 207), or to fulfil the needs of business strategy: “organizational management is a vital ingredient in securing improved business performance” (Woodall and Winstanley, 1998, p. 3). In the past decade, ideas of critical thinking have been increasingly related to management, motivated by a rejection of the conception of management as a technical activity. As Alvesson and Willmott (1996, p. 17) argue, “the functional rhetoric of technical rationality” denies or mystifies the moral basis of management practice. A critical perspective would offer managers “an appreciation of the pressures that lead managerial work to become so deeply implicated in the unremitting exploitation of nature and human beings, national and international extremes of wealth and poverty, the creation of global pollution, the promotion of “needs” for consumer products” etc. (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996, p. 39). Despite the increased interest in a critical management perspective, there is a dearth of empirical experience of expediting critical HRD. This issue addresses these gaps and illuminates the emergence of HRD and its “critical turn”. The papers presented provide a review of what being “Critical” might involve in the context of HRD, by