distinction between the rhetoric and reality of HRM in contemporary debates’
which ‘essentially replays an identical relationship between ideological practice and
the truth’ to that seen in Marxist discourse (Barratt 2003 : 1071 ). Legge illustrates
this Marxian tendency when she analyzes HRM rhetoric, for example, as ‘masking
the intensiWcation and commodiWcation of labor’ ( 1995 : 325 ). Although it was
recast in Weberian terms as an example of the paradox of consequences,
there was an echo of Marx in the Watson ( 1977 ) account of the societal role of
personnel management as one caught up in managing some of the ‘contradictions
of capitalism.’
- 4 The Post-Structuralist and Discursive Strand
The post-structuralist element of social thought, closely connected to ‘postmodern’
thinking, treats human and social reality as if it were a text—a set of signs which are
not tied into any kind of pre-existing reality. The implication of this is that there is
no basic truth outside language and that there is no reality separate from the ways
in which we write and talk about the world. Thus, as Westwood and Linstead put it
with regard to organizations, ‘Organization has no autonomous, stable or struc-
tural status outside the text that constitutes it’ ( 2001 : 4 ). This means, Reed observes,
that any ‘quest for universal, scientiWc generalizations or principles of organization
and management, that has played a dominant role in organization theory’s histor-
ical and intellectual development, isWrmly rejected in favor of a much more
relativist and political conception of knowledge production and diVusion’ ( 2005 :
1623 ). The post-structuralist theorist who has had the greatest impact on organ-
ization theory has been Foucault, and central to the parts of his work that have
been taken up by writers on work and organization has been his emphasis on
‘decentring the human subject.’ This entails rejecting any concept of an autono-
mous thinking and feeling human subject with an essential and unique personality
or ‘self.’ The human being’s notion of ‘who and what they are’ is shaped by the
discourses which surround them. These discourses exert power over people by
creating the categories into which they areWtted: ‘the homosexual,’ ‘the criminal,’
the ‘mentally ill,’ for example (Foucault 1980 ). Such categories not only deWne for
people ‘who they are’ but lay down the ways in which people are to be treated by
others.
The relevance of these insights to issues of human resourcing is fairly obvious.
Discourses are society’s statements of ‘truth and knowledge’ and, as McKinlay and
Starkey ( 1998 ) put it, these are the means whereby ‘society manages itself.’ There is
a potential, then, for theorizing HRM in these terms: as a set of statements of truth
and knowledge through which people’s subjectivities are managed in modern
societies. This has been taken up by Townley who analyzes HRM as a ‘discourse
and technology of power that aims to resolve the gap inherent in the contract of
organization theory and hrm 119