employment between the capacity to work and its exercise and, thereby, organize
workers into a collective, productive power or force’ ( 1994 : 138 ). Findlay and
Newton ( 1998 ) focus on appraisal practices to demonstrate the insights that
Foucauldian thinking has to oVer and Barratt ( 2003 ) puts forward a spirited defense
of Foucauldian perspectives on HRM and HRM-related issues in response to its
critics. Legge ( 1995 ) looks at the discourse of HRM in a similar manner and has also
utilized post-structuralist ideas of deconstruction (Derrida 1978 ) to enable readers
of HRM to ‘take apart the texts and stories of the advocates of human resource
management’ to bring out their paradoxes, contradictions, and absences ( 2001 : 53 ).
Discourse analysis, it should be noted, is not only used by organization theorists
following a post-structuralist line of argument (see Alvesson and Karreman 2000 ;
Grant et al. 1998 , 2004 ). Watson ( 2001 b) used a concept of discourse to identify two
rival ways in which human resourcing issues were understood and acted upon in a
large business organization and Francis and Sinclair have applied it to cases of
‘HRM-based change’ ( 2003 ).
6.6 Conclusions: Theorizing HRM with
Resources from Organization Theory
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
It was suggested earlier that the way forward in the relationship between organ-
ization theory and HRM might be one in which pragmatic pluralist principles are
followed. This would mean that, within an ontologically and epistemologically
consistent framework, concepts are drawn from the various theoretical traditions
or ‘strands’ to deepen our understanding of HRM practices. Table 6. 1 summarizes
the above analysis of the various strands of organization theory which have had an
impact on HRM. And, in its right-hand column, the table identiWes some of the
ideas that can be brought together from the four strands to analyze HRM practices
and events.
The theoretical resources set out in the right-hand column of Table 6. 1 do not
constitute a complete ‘theory of HRM.’ What is provided here is nevertheless
inevitably informed by the broader theorizing of personnel and HR institutions
developed by the present author. That theorizing has occurred in the context of
attempting to make sense of and explain events observed in detailed case-study
research on the shaping of HR strategies in ‘real life’ (as opposed to textbook
idealizations) practices of employing organizations. The analysis of strategic
changes in a case study business (Watson 2004 , 2005 ) attempts to go beyond
what is typically produced in the mainstream HRM literature and handles—and
relates to each other—both the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ aspects of HRM processes.
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