The Ideological Evolution of Human Resource Management

A Critical Look into HRM Research and Practices

Sami Itani

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787433908
• eBook ISBN: 9781787434608
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book is a pioneering work that maps out the ideological evolution of HRM research and practices, with a particular focus on our contemporary era of multinational corporations. It explores the ideological evolution of Human Resource Management (HRM) from the 1950s to the present day and maps out the development of HRM research and practices from a Critical Theory perspective. Its findings open up avenues for metatheoretical development within the HRM research field and provide employees under modern capitalism with emancipatory awareness.

Both the theoretical framework and the empirical findings of this study will be of interest to HRM researchers as well as management researchers of all epistemological backgrounds, particularly those working within Critical Management Studies. This work will also appeal to teachers and students, and it could serve as a textbook for a number of postgraduate level courses, including Organization Theory, Critical Management Studies, Human Resource Management, Business History, Sociology of Management, and Critical Theory. 

CHAPTER
1

Conceptual Part – Reviewing the Literature

The aim of this literature review is to provide an overview of Critical Theory to explicate ideology critique as it is applied in this study. To do this, I will first introduce my conceptual approach to “Critical Theory” – that is, what is actually meant by the concept in this book – and then introduce and elaborate the concept of “ideology” and particularly its three pivotal approaches in the critical tradition. Afterward, I have included a chapter covering “metatheory, research paradigms, and HRM,” following which the theoretical backbone of this book, Giddens’s (1979) five forms of ideology, is introduced.

Moreover, as will be seen, I have supplemented Giddens’s framework with related concepts from Critical Theory’s past, such as class struggle, false-consciousness, alienation, reification, hegemony, instrumental reason, one-dimensionality, communicative action, panopticon, and genealogy. These concepts are subsequently elaborated in detail, and by doing this I aim to demonstrate that: (1) Giddens’s framework is in many ways loyal to Critical Theory; (2) the framework brilliantly encapsulates the essence and versatility of “ideology” in modern societies, which makes it appropriate for the aims of this book; (3) the framework can be rightfully supplemented to make it more approachable for business and management scholars; (4) the framework can be contextualized into management and Human Resource Management (HRM) in both theory and in practice; most of all, (5) the framework can be seen as a contemporary manifestation of a historical and dialectical process that contains two centuries of critical thinking, and hence it is an underutilized treasure for any epistemologically critical business scholar. Lastly, I have finished the literature review by introducing some central streams in criticism of Critical Theory.

1.1. Critical Theory versus critical theory?

Critical Theory has posed a significant variety of questions relating to the major assumptions of philosophy, the humanities, and social theory, as well as sharply criticized specific fields of social science such as sociology, political science, and economics. Within contemporary management studies, and elsewhere in the social sciences, Critical Theory has been generally treated in a twofold manner. For some, Critical Theory is a distinct and coherent line of thought, the philosophical and ideological roots of which can be traced through a continuum from German idealist philosophy to Marxist theory, which was impacted or developed further most prominently by Gramsci, Lukacs, Weber, Althusser, and lastly the Frankfurt School. For others, however, Critical Theory represents an umbrella concept for numerous theories that are reflecting post-Marxist thought in varying degrees. Particularly, after the advent of the philosophical linguistic turn (i.e., the central task of philosophical analysis began to be the analysis of language use), which originated in the later works of Wittgenstein (Fox & Miller, 2006), since the 1960s we have witnessed the emergence of theoretically related research fields. Examples of these have ranged from deconstructionists, poststructuralists, postmodernists, and cultural materialists to second- and third-wave feminists, postcolonialists, new historicists, and black critics, all under the umbrella of Critical Theory (Alvesson & Willmott, 2003; Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Held, 1980; Kelner, 2008).

I have chosen the former, “classical” (Kelner, 2008, p. xi) interpretation of Critical Theory as the theoretical common thread in this study, particularly as it is fundamentally intertwined with questions concerning ideology; ideology critique being its main goal (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). Also, it is distinctly the original thought of the Critical Management School, in addition to some references to Foucauldian analysis (Alvesson, Bridgman, & Willmott, 2009). The latter, “more inclusive” interpretation of critical theory will receive only limited attention despite the fact that both interpretations can fruitfully engage, challenge and supplement each other, and share apparent epistemological, ontological, and methodological similarities (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). Hence, from now on, classical Critical Theory will be written with capital letters and the more inclusive critical theory without capitals, in keeping with a similar convention adopted for example by Martin (2003) and Boje (2008).

In addition, the emancipatory aims of this study further justify use of Critical Theory, but as will become apparent later, in the context of organizational life and HRM one cannot, or should not (Steffy & Grimes, 1992; Townley, 1994, p. 182), exclude Foucault from the analysis when using Critical Theory. Hence, his ideas will partially supplement the Critical Theorists. Also, although Foucault is often portrayed as a postmodernist or poststructuralist and has had his quarrels with the Frankfurt School (see, e.g., Ashenden & Owen, 1999), in his later works he became increasingly sympathetic toward Critical Theory and emphasized how “it is this form of philosophy that, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber to the Frankfurt School, has founded a form of reflection in which I have tried to work” (Foucault, 1994, p. 148 as cited in Alvesson & Willmott, 2003, p. 4).

Next, to properly begin the literature review, it is necessary to present and elaborate ideology, which is the key concept around which the principles of Critical Theory are built. Furthermore, while discussing the concept I will simultaneously touch upon its relationship with science and particularly the social sciences.

1.2. Conceptualizing Ideology in the Critical Tradition

The etymology of ideology derives from the Greek idea (“form,” “pattern”) and – logos (denoting discourse or compilation). The concept was first used in the dialogues of the French Enlightenment in the late 18th century (Eagleton, 1991, p. 5). Since then, there have been several ways to define this frequently used term and treat it in the social sciences; Terry Eagleton (1991), for example, has enumerated and elaborated 16 definitions of “ideology.” Most generally, it has been argued that ideology concerns ideals, values, beliefs, and ways of exploring the world (Alvesson, 1991); but, beyond these widespread views there is fairly little consensus on the nuances of the concept (e.g., Alvesson, 1987; Alvesson & Willmott, 1992; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988; Held, 1980).

The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford dictionaries, 2014) defines ideology in a relatively neutral and reasonable manner as “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” According to this definition, for example, republicanism or neoliberalism could be seen as examples of ideologies. However, for Critical Theorists, ideology is hardly so straightforward and easily detectable. It is instead seen as a political tool that implicitly naturalizes the power of specific interest groups and in any case includes the notions of inequality and power (Giddens, 2001, p. 691). Nevertheless, even within Critical Theory there are distinct main orientations for defining ideology, all of which supplement each other despite their differences. Marx, Althusser, and Habermas have been among the most impactful intellects in providing meanings and explanations for ideologies in the critical tradition, and according to Giddens himself, it is particularly their definitions that build the basis for the five forms of ideology (Giddens, 1979), which is why I will elaborate their thoughts next.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is without doubt one of the most prominent intellects ever to elaborate the dominant ideological questions and the consequences of them. As a young student, Marx was fascinated and strongly influenced by philosophy, and particularly the works of G.W.F Hegel (1770–1831). However, Marx came to reject what he called the idealistic and mystical nature of Hegel’s work and gradually turned to the materialistic ideas of a “young Hegelian” thinker, Ludwig Feuerbach, from which he soon moved beyond to the view that the everyday material conditions under which people live actually create the way the world is seen and understood. For Hegel, human beings create their own history, but “in conditions only partly disclosed to them in terms of their own consciousness: conditions that can only be understood retrospectively” (Giddens, 1979, p. 166). Marx rejected the latter claim and said that philosophical, unscientific ideas can be replaced by social analysis – reliable, rational, grounded, and safe knowledge – which can of course possess its own ideological function, although this can, however, be overcome (Marx & Engels, 1965; Shivastava, 1986). Similarly, Marx denied Hegel’s notion of the state and religion as reflections of the “absolute spirit” and saw them instead as creations of “man” in line with other ideological constructs (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). After this revolutionary idea of Marx, the diagnosis of ideology became a mode of penetrating beyond the human consciousness and of unveiling “the real” foundations of ideologies’ operation, this being harnessed to the end of social transformation. From now on, empirical and scientific societal study could analyze and eliminate the distortion of consciousness that had taken place within ideology. For this reason in 1846 Marx, together with Engels, wrote The German Ideology (1965), which Althusser (1969) considered an embodiment of Marx’s so-called “epistemological break.” Moreover, starting from this book, Marx took distance from German idealism and moved toward a more realist interpretation of the social world and began to develop social sciences without abstract forms of philosophical arguments.

In the first chapter of The German Ideology (1965, p. 37), Marx and Engels wrote the following:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

Here, they argued that ideologies produce twisted effects where the reality is the opposite of appearance. For them, it is the powerful elites that project a false version of reality, which serves in upholding their own interests and ruling position. These false versions of reality (i.e., ideologies) can be disclosed through empirical historical analysis. Like the Marxist sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) later illuminated that the point in his Ideology and Utopia (1936, p. 3) is the following: “strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to say that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him,” and by “other men” we mean people of the previous ruling classes.

Marx and Engel’s (1965) citation above did not explicitly bring forth the position and power of the ruling elites, but on page 61 they particularize that it is precisely those who rule the material production systems also control mental production in each time and place:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

They continue with an elucidating example of their own 19th-century Europe:

For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”

One could argue that the validity of the same example is proven correct, for instance, by the 20th-century British (or Dutch, Swedish, or many other) aristocracy when they realized that the mass of the citizenry no longer accepted them as hereditary rulers. Incrementally and successfully, the aristocracy redesigned themselves into an acceptable nostalgic, picturesque, and traditional remnant, and even today we can see how they have managed to stay at the heart of capital and power. Consequently, Marx and Engels argue that philosophers, such as Hegel and the rest of the social analysts or historians, have traditionally failed to scrutinize the material basis of ideology; they have not been able to demystify ideology but have instead written history “upside down” (like the camera obscura) from within the wave of the dominant ideas of each era. As will be seen, this idea of ideology has since reappeared regularly in the texts of some of the most prominent Critical Theorists.

Also, Althusser believed that ideologies inversely present the real state of affairs, but unlike Marx to whom ideology is a rather overt political position, Althusser states that ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (Althusser, 1977). This implies that ideologies are even more thoroughly hidden social agendas than Marx would have admitted, and that the dominant ideology “hijacks” the individual so that the current state of the social world is naturalized and cannot be seen in any other way. Althusser (1977) joins a stream of (French) essentialists in arguing that instead of “human nature” of some degree, we humans have ideology alone. Ideology structures our consciousness and is largely determined by “ideological state apparatuses.” Suppressive state apparatuses (army, police forces, law, etc.) function through force and violence, but ideological state apparatuses (political, cultural, communicational, educational institutions, etc.) function through thoughts, values, and attitudes, which mainly, but not entirely, stem from the ruling classes. However, unlike Marx suggested, these ideological state apparatuses also have freedom of their own, and they are not merely unilateral tools of capitalism obeying economic determinism.

In fact, Althusser (1969) did not consider ideology specifically as a creation of bourgeois society but rather considered it a functionally necessary feature of every type of society. In other words, ideology “is indispensable in every society, in order to shape men, to transform them to respond to the exigencies of existence” (p. 235). Nevertheless, ideologies tend to be de facto oppressive in nature because they make individuals into subjects who consider themselves free agents, but who are actually not. The concept of “subject” refers to theories of language as a domain in which an individual is localized (or is placed to localize) into a certain position within social structures. Althusser’s (1969, pp. 234–235) quotation below illustrates the point. Here he uses post-WWII capitalism and its characteristic rhetorics of workers’ “freedom” as an example of oppressive ideology where people’s subjects are manipulated so that they believe that they are free individuals who have at last been liberated from domination:

In the ideology of freedom, the bourgeoisie lives in a direct fashion its relation to its conditions of existence: that is to say, its real relation (the law of the liberal capitalist economy), but incorporated in an imaginary relation (all men are free, including free workers). Its ideology consists in this world-play about freedom, which betrays just as much the bourgeois will to mystify those it exploits (free!) in order to keep them in harness, by bondage to freedom, as the need of the bourgeoisie to live its class domination as the freedom of the exploited.

Later, I will discuss how such an interpretation of ideology is fairly similar to Foucault’s ideas about power and its manifestation through the individual’s subject.

Another distinctive difference with Marx is that Althusser employed his concept of ideology “without making any normative judgements” (Honneth, 2004, p. 324), nor did he use it in an extremely critical sense, but rather restricted himself to a purely descriptive use of the concept (Geuss, 1981), which is an excellent example of the descriptive alignment of critical theory. Althusser did not consider the study of ideology a way to obtain a genuine or real representation of social reality, but saw it instead as integral to the constitution of social life and part of the reality at hand. For Althusser, numerous previous theories erred by presuming that ideology was an essentially passive representation of economic and political conditions, although it should be seen as the “social cement” that creates a total and imaginary existence through which and in which people’s consciousness exists (Eagleton, 1991; Giddens, 1979). Consequently, no ideology-free state of affairs can exist in any social setting, and regardless of whether we label them “scientific” ideologies or “false” ideologies, they are all necessary conditions for human societies and the medium for individual consciousness.

On the other hand, Habermas treats ideology as distorted communication, which also became evident in his theory of communicative action (1984, 1987a), as will be discussed in a later chapter elaborating the Frankfurt School. Despite obvious similarities, Habermas has some fundamental disagreements with Althusser – namely with his statement that ideology is necessarily present in every place and time of each human society. Habermas (1962, 1991) argues that ideology has not always existed but instead came into being through the development of modern societies and politics. Moreover, the emergence of modern societies alone did not craft ideologies. In addition, the ideology critique that emerged at the same time was a necessary condition. This critique was evident in open societal debate that relied on reason rather than traditions or the fiat of the powerful. In other words, Habermas believes that it is not possible to identify ideology without uncovering the modes in which ideas are governed by forces other than rational and conscious processes. Hence, the notion of ideology is intrinsically linked to the critique of ideology.

Although it is apparent that like Marx, Habermas has faith in the emancipatory power of science and believes that science can possess ideologically neutral forms, in his 1971 essay Technology and science as ideology, Habermas argues that in the contemporary era, the thorough fusion of science, technology, and bourgeoisie ideas has made science particularly vulnerable to ideological distortion. Ideology can systematically distort science and other accounts of reality, which then conceal and legitimate social asymmetries and injustices (Habermas, 1972). However, research that aims to criticize ideology can reach a state in which communication is “free from domination” and “unrestricted”: an ideology critique of this kind can be compared with the translation of the unconscious into the conscious. The critique of ideology hence involves uncovering the sources of distorted communication. Ideology as such is therefore not essentially a type of idea system but rather a dimension or an aspect of symbols involved in communication. Habermas (1980) lists four types of “validity claims” that implicitly exist in all communication and social interaction. If any of the claims is not present in any given circumstance (i.e., “symbol system”), the communication is distorted. The validity claims in communication are that (1) what is communicated is mutually intelligible between the communication parties; (2) its content is factually true; (3)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 Conceptual Part – Reviewing the Literature
• Chapter 2 Methodology
• Chapter 3 Empirical Part – Findings in Their Historical Contexts
• Chapter 4 Conclusions and Discussion
• Appendix
• References
• About the Author
• Index