Human Resource Development as We Know It

Speeches that Have Shaped the Field

Monica Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415896184
• eBook ISBN: 9781136458798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

The field of Human Resource Development has developed largely through academics, scholars and reflective practitioners from across the world coming together. Many people link memorable keynote speeches to changes in their research, practice, career path or even life view. Good keynote speeches are a forthright statement of the expert's view and thus are often not published. Now that HRD is maturing there is a need to recapture some of those earlier moments – both as a form of archive, and also to shed light on the path that has been followed.

Twenty-two speeches seminal to the field of HRD are included in this volume. These speeches are milestones along the path of the development of the field; as well as reconstructing their speech, the contributors have also located it within the time it was given and commented on how the field has developed since. This book is a resource, not only as an archive and for those who wish to relive their pivotal moments, but also for anyone interested in the development of HRD as a discipline. This unique approach provides an exciting and engaging way to reflect on cutting edge issues in the academic and practitioner world of HRD!

Part I

Conceptualization

The chapters in this section have a particular focus on the nature of HRD and how it is conceived. This section starts with an early speech of my own, in which I questioned the scientistic and definitional paradigm of HRD, one that appeared to give HRD the legitimacy it sought as it developed its academic roots, but also one that denied the very nature of HRD. This is followed by a speech by Yvonna Lincoln, who makes a similar argument from a different perspective—that of evaluation and research methodology. She urges HRD researchers to consider the use of interpretivist and qualitative methodologies. Both of these early speeches are concerned with what HRD might ‘mean’ and how we might examine that. Also speaking in 2004, Thomas Garavan considers global HRD, and the understanding of HRD within international and multinational concerns, establishing the notion of International or IHRD. By 2009, and Paul Iles’s speech, our focus is upon HRD as an aspect of leadership development and talent management, within the arms of IHRD. The last speech in this section is that of Sally Sambrook, who reflects on the more recent area of Critical HRD, as built upon multi-faceted notions of an HRD that varies with circumstances. Thus Sally’s work takes us in a spiral, much further along from 2000, but incorporating the early challenges posed by Monica Lee and Yvonna Lincoln.

1 A Refusal to Define HRD

Monica Lee

In this chapter I use I use the example of a MSc in HRD that I designed to illustrate that although at times it is necessary to define HRD for political or social reasons, there is a strong case that HRD should not be defined on philosophical, theoretical and practical grounds. To proffer definitions of HRD is to misrepresent it as a thing of being rather than a process of becoming. I suggest that we need to look to the notion of emergent HRD and enjoy the ability to live with negative capability!

(1st International Conference on HRD across Europe, Kingston University, London, UK, 2000)

Context

The ideas that I explore here were first aired in 2000 as part of a UK Research Seminar Series sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on Human Resource Development: The Emerging Theoretical Agenda and Empirical Research, which I jointly convened with Jean Woodall and Jim Stewart. The aim of the seminar series was to provide a forum in which HRD scholars and scholar-practitioners could debate leading-edge research in HRD in a more relaxed environment than can be provided by the typical academic conference schedule. The majority of participants were UK and European, although speakers were attracted from across the globe. HRD was still in its infancy, and these seminars had the enthusiastic atmosphere of fostering and exploring a new and challenging way forward. Three books in the ‘Studies in HRD Series’ arose from these seminars, as did many papers and, also, UFHRD’s system of annual conferences.

I was founding editor of Human Resource Development International (HRDI), and it had been going for a couple of very successful years with lots of contributions, alternative perspectives and debates within its pages. One of the central debates revolved around what the definition of HRD ‘ought’ to be. The underlying presumption was that without definition HRD would never be considered a valid academic discipline. I found this very frustrating, for reasons that I explore below, and so I decided to challenge this view head-on when I spoke at the ESRC seminar series.

The Presentation: A Refusal to Define HRD

Hello. I want to use this time to argue that on philosophical, theoretical, professional and practical grounds HRD should not be defined, and that to do so is to misrepresent HRD as a thing of being rather than a process of becoming.

I will start with an example. In the early 1990s I started a master’s course at Lancaster University in the UK (MSC in HRD by Research). I designed this to lead to both professional and academic qualifications for international cohorts of senior HRD professionals, via a series of intense week-long workshops, interspersed with research projects in their organizations. They knew there was no set syllabus before they started, that the course ‘material’ would spring from them; however, each cohort followed the same basic pattern of group dynamics. In the first workshop people were getting their bearings—by the second workshop two months later, after they been back at work and started to reflect upon links between the academic and professional sides of their lives, the feel of the group would change—ravenous for knowledge and demanding of the tutors. What was it they were meant to be learning! Why was I refusing to give them the tool kit!

The defining of HRD became paramount in most people’s minds. It was as if they believed that once they knew the definition of HRD then they would understand what HRD ‘is’. They would then be able to manage their jobs, and the course—their future study and work roles will be laid out in front of them, such that so long as they know where the path was, they could achieve excellence through sheer hard work. These views shifted quite rapidly, but for that workshop, they held that if I failed to define HRD for them, then, as course designer and leader I would be preventing them from achieving—furthermore, they questioned, how could I design a course without knowing what I was doing? Despite (at times, intense) pressure I have succeeded in refusing to define HRD for the last twenty years, and this event represents a rehearsal of the justifications that I used then, and since, for my obdurate behavior. I will argue that HRD is tacitly ‘defined’ by our experiences; it is situation specific and dynamic; it is in a state of becoming; and exploration of it merits an emergent approach.

I shall tie this account around that of the master’s program that I mention above. This program was terminated after running for only four cohorts, yet, unlike many master’s programs, it generated income and proved to be extremely successful with the students, many of whom say that it has fundamentally changed their lives. The problem was not quality, either, as the majority of students achieved exceptionally good academic results, even though several came with very little prior academic experience. The problem was that it adopted a philosophy and practice fundamentally different from that of ‘normal’ academe.

The Philosophical Case for Refusing to Define HRD

I used the design of this program to explore some of my ideas of adult education, and, having only recently joined university life after twenty years working for others and myself in the field, I did not fully realize quite how unusual my ideas would seem to the ‘system.’ I designed my master’s program in accordance with how I understood my role as an HRD professional, and as an ‘educator’ of others. It seemed to me that while I carried a central core of understanding from each experience that came my way, ‘I’, and ‘my understanding’ shifted and changed according to that experience—and each experience influenced, and was influenced by, future experiences. I could never say ‘this is the organization,’ ‘this is my role,’ and ‘this is what I am doing’ as I could never manage to complete or finalize any of these states.

Similarly, as an educator, I could not identify with any firm body of knowledge and say ‘this is what is needed.’ I could see that people needed knowledge, but that most of what they needed would be situation specific —the knowledge needed by an Angolan participant would be very different from that needed by someone working in Hong Kong. People working multi-nationally needed different knowledge and skills than did those working with SMEs; working in the voluntary sector appeared fundamentally different from working with the corporate fat cats, and so on. I could see that people needed different knowledge and skills, and that they would need to shift and change—to emerge into new roles and ‘selves.’ However, I could not build a course that specified that—instead I built one that refused to specify—or at least, the only specification was for the areas of focus on the different workshops, the form (not the content) of the assessed research projects and international placement and the form of process that occurred over the different days of each workshop.

The program consisted of eight four-day workshops over one and a half yours, and was assessed through three guided work-based research projects, an international placement, a learning log and a dissertation. Following a Kolbian pattern, I designed the process of each workshop to force a focus on the academic [theory], followed by one on the professional (self within group) [reflection], and then the individual [planning], before the return to work [experience]. During the first two days of each workshop I invited specialists who I knew would present different views to come and talk to the group about the topic of that workshop (half a day each), with specific instructions to be controversial and to follow their pet theories. For each half day the group lived in the world of that specialist—and, given the diversity of each group, there was lots of discussion and hard questioning. I would refuse to clarify, and insisted that all persons had to come to their own decisions on the differing views presented.

I was very determined in ensuring that the third day shifted to one of no content. It was called ‘academic debate’ as it was set aside for the group to work with the ideas from the previous two days and with their own processes, contextualizing theory with practice. This was, initially, hard for the participants, and proved to be very hard for co-tutors (more of that later). The majority of participants came from commerce-based pressured lives where they had to be doing something. Quite often the group got ‘stuck,’ and occasionally I would jump in with some exercise or idea to shift them, but despite the real pain sometimes associated with the processes of self within group, each group eventually came to value the creation of a reflective space in this way.

While the whole program was based on principles of action learning,¹ the fourth day made this more explicit. The group split into sub-groups of about six people each, and these were run as a facilitative action learning set. Each person would have about an hour (even if they said they didn’t want it!) in which to address whatever issues they wished. These normally started as work issues, but quickly shifted to individual/group issues, and then, over the next year, moved increasingly toward issues associated with completing the dissertation!

I designed the course like this because it felt like the best way to foster reflective practitioners able to develop and marry best practice with academic credibility and personal strength. I was not fully aware, at the time, of my underlying philosophical assumptions in doing so, or the extent to which they would be alien to the majority of my immediate academic community.

As Chia² states, ‘Contemporary Western modes of thought are circumscribed by two great and competing pre-Socratic cosmologies or ‘worldviews’, which provided and continue to provide the most general conceptual categories for organizing thought and directing human effort. Heraclitus, a native of Ephesus in ancient Greece, emphasized the primacy of a changeable and emergent world while Parmenides, his successor, insisted upon the permanent and unchangeable nature of reality.’

Parmenides’s view of reality is reflected in the continued dominance of the ‘belief that science constitutes, by far, the most valuable part of human learning and accomplishment.’ This leads to an atomistic conception of reality in which ‘clear-cut, definite things are deemed to occupy clear-cut definite places in space and time’; thus causality becomes the conceptual tool used for linking these isolates, and the state of rest is considered normal, whereas movement is considered as a straightforward transition from one stable state to another. The metaphysical basis for the organization of modern thought and the perpetration of a system of classificatory taxonomies, hierarchies and categories which, in turn, serve as the institutionalized vocabulary for representing our experiences of reality is rooted in a being ontology. This is associated with a representationalist epistemology in which formal knowledge is deemed to be that which is produced by the rigorous application of the system of classifications on our phenomenal experiences in order to arrive at an accurate description of reality. In other words a being ontology is conceptualized with one ‘true’ reality, the units of which are tied together in a causal system. The truth is out there; we just have to find it!

In contrast, the Heraclitean viewpoint offers a becoming ontology in which how an entity becomes constitutes what the actual entity is; so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the principle of process. “The ‘flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.”³ Within such a process epistemology the individuals involved feel themselves to be significant nodes in a dynamic network and are neither merely passive receivers nor dominant agents imposing their preconceived scheme of things onto that which they apprehend.⁴ All are the parts of the whole, and the parts, and the whole, change and develop together. From this point of view, there are both one and many realities, in which I ‘myself’ come into being through interacting with these and am constituted within them, and the knowing of these is never final or finished. A personal quality necessary for ‘living’ within such a process epistemology could be that of John Keats’s ‘negative capability.’⁵ This quality involves the resisting of conceptual closures and the desire to stay with the open-endedness and indeterminacy of experience. Conceptual resistance thereby creates the necessary ‘space’ for the formulation of personal insights and managerial foresight.⁶

These notions gave me a peg on which to pin my understanding of why my program did not suit some of my colleagues: it (and I) was coming from a fundamentally different philosophy from that which they adopted. In essence, my world was one of becoming, while theirs was one of being. A program that generated its own content was fine by me, but anathema to th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Studies in Human Resource Development
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Jim Stewart
• Foreword by AAhad M. Osman-Gani
• Forword by Darlene Russ-Eft
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptualization
• Part II Location
• Part III Implementation
• Part IV Value'ation
• Part V Visualization
• Summary
• List of Contributors
• References
• List of Abbreviations
• Index