Extensive Summary A Critical Approach to SHRL - MAN-MHR015
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A Critical Approach to SHRL (MANBCU341)
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Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (RU)
Extensive Summary A Critical Approach to SHRL - MAN-MHR015 - from the year 2023/2024. All mandatory chapters from Bratton & Gold (incl. chapter 11), and articles from the course guide!
Chapters Bratton & Gold
Chapter 1 Contemporary Human Resource Management ........................................................... 31
Chapter 2 Corporate Strategy and Strategic HRM......................................................................... 44
Chapter 3 Job and Work Design ....................................................................................................... 51
Chapter 4 Workforce Planning and Diversity ................................................................................. 59
Chapter 5 Recruitment and Selection .............................................................................................. 68
Chapter 6 Performance Management .............................................................................................. 76
Chapter 7 Learning and Development............................................................................................. 84
Chapter 10 Employee Relations and Conflict Management ......................................................... 93
Chapter 11 HRM, Health and Well-Being..................................................................................... 101
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,Article Adler (2007)
Critical management studies (CMS) offers a range of alternatives to mainstream management theory
with a view to radically transforming management practice. The common core is deep scepticism
regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of prevailing conceptions
and forms of management and organization. CMS’s motivating concern is neither the personal failures
of individual managers nor the poor management of specific firms, but the social injustice and
environmental destructiveness of the broader social and economic systems that these managers and
firms serve and reproduce.
Introduction
When describing the concept critical, we can take teamwork as an example. In a large body of
mainstream research, teamwork is presented as a means by which managers can more effectively
mobilize employees to improve business performance. By reorganizing work so as better to
accommodate task interdependencies, and by leaving team members a margin of autonomy in deciding
how to handle these interdependencies, teamwork is often presented as a “win-win” policy, making
work simultaneously more satisfying for employees and more effective for the business. Issues such as
workforce diversity are studied as factors that can facilitate or impede effective teamwork, and if they
impede it, research addresses how the problem can be mitigated. In CMS research, both the practice of
teamwork and the mainstream theories that inform it are seen as more problematic. Mainstream
research ignores or views as pathological, the solidarity of teams in pursuing their own agendas and
priorities, in resisting autocratic foremen, making work meaningful, or simply having fun at work.
Critical research has shown how teamwork, when indeed management corrals it toward business goals,
can result in the oppressive internalization of business values and goals by team members, who then
begin exploiting themselves and disciplining team peers in the name of business performance and being
“responsible” team players. The resulting conformism suppresses democratic dialogue about the
appropriateness of the underlying values and goals. Critical studies show how teamwork routinely
reinforces established class and authority hierarchies as well as oppressive gender and ethnic relations.
Critical research has also sought to understand the various mechanisms that make teamwork attractive
for many employees not withstanding its negative effects.
It shows how discourses that are used to legitimate and enforce teamwork occlude social divisions and
promote a vision of the firm as a functionally unified entity or as one big happy family. Critical research
does not see the problems of teamwork as intrinsic, it diagnoses the shortcomings of teamwork in
practice in terms of its embeddedness in broader patterns of relations of domination, relations that
operate to narrow and compromise laudable aims of increasing discretion and participation. CMS today
addresses a wide variety of management issues in a broad range of fields, not only OB-HRM and OT, but
also industrial relations, strategy, accounting, information systems research, international business,
marketing, and so forth.
Across these fields, the CMS use of the term critical signifies more than an endorsement of the standard
norms of scientific scepticism or the general value of “critical thinking.” It signifies more than a focus on
issues that are important to make a decision rather than marginal. Critical here signifies radical
critique. By radical is signalled an attentiveness to the socially divisive and ecologically destructive
broader patterns and structures, such as capitalism, patriarchy, neo-imperialism, and so forth—that
condition local action and conventional wisdom. By critique, we mean beyond criticism of specific,
problematic beliefs and practices (e.g. teamwork), CMS aims to show how such beliefs and practices are
nurtured by, and serve to sustain, divisive and destructive patterns and structures; and how their
reproduction is contingent and changeable, not necessary nor unavoidable. In developing its critical
agenda, CMS has been influenced by contemporary developments beyond academia.
A succession of major natural and social crises has brought into sharp focus issues that previously may
have seemed more peripheral, issues such as business ethics, environmentalism, and neo-imperialism.
These broader developments have direct relevance for the everyday conduct of management and the
everyday experience of work, they rarely take center stage in mainstream scholarship and teaching. CMS
has consistently raised the concerns about the demoralized state of management research. According to
2
, Ghoshal ‘’Academic research related to the conduct of business and management has had some very
significant and negative influences on the practice of management by propagating ideologically inspired
amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral
responsibility’’. CMS radicalizes such sentiments by pointing to how prevailing structures of domination
produce a systemic corrosion of moral responsibility when any concern for people or for the
environment requires justification in terms of its contribution to profitable growth.
Progress
Since the recommendations of the influential Ford and Carnegie reports in the 1950s, business schools
have been placed squarely within universities. The rationale for this was explicitly technocratic: business
expertise and education should be set upon an analytical, scientific foundation equivalent to that then
being developed in the social sciences and in the teaching of the engineering disciplines. A positivist,
value-free model of scientific knowledge was enthroned, marginalizing other approaches. Positivism is
a particularly slippery term, so it is useful to define it, namely an approach which assumes that (a) there
is an objective external reality awaiting discovery and dissection by science; (b) scientific method gives
privileged access to reality; (c) language provides a transparent medium for categorization,
measurement and representation; (d) the observer scientists occupies a position outside and above
reality from which he or she develops and validates robust theories about reality.
It promised the production of impartial, rigorous, and reliable knowledge capable of replacing the
contestability of custom and practice with the authority of management’s own science. Once installed in
universities, business schools came into closer contact with the social sciences, who themselves were
evolving. The broader liberalization of advanced capitalist societies and their universities, combined
with the growing disillusionment amongst policy makers with the relevance of the dry, abstract
knowledge emerging from the social sciences, led to some relaxation of the grip of positivism in late
1960s and 1970s. Across the social sciences, the established positivist hegemony began to be multiplied
(but not displaced) by alternative research traditions, including varieties of Marxism, hermeneutics, and
pragmatism, that promised to draw researchers closer to the complexities and contradictions of the
social world. The effects on business schools were moderated and delayed, because these schools were
concurrently expanding rapidly in number and size in tandem with the growth of large corporations and
the associated demands for credentialed managerial labour. The shift within the social sciences was
eventually repeated in business schools, albeit in weaker and often more compromised form.
The most significant openings were in the fields of management and accounting; changes were also seen
in information systems and marketing. In this context, a number of the more established and prestigious
management journals began to accommodate some heterodox research. This development facilitated
the promotion and the recruitment of more critically oriented faculty. It also enabled the broadening of
undergraduate curricula and some recruitment of critically oriented doctoral students. CMS has been
the strongest in the UK. A second wave of growth in the UK became visible in 1999, when an
unexpectedly large number of people participated in the first CMS Conference. This conference and the
biannual series it inaugurated differentiated itself from the Labour Process Conference by extending
to a broader range of themes and by engaging more intensively with postmodernist and
poststructuralist ideas, to support the community.
Common themes
The widespread use of the CMS label to identify alternatives to established, mainstream conceptions of
management followed the publication of Alvesson and Willmott’s. However, the tradition of critical
management studies goes back to older, humanistic critiques of bureaucracy and corporate capitalism
as well as to the tradition of research inspired by labour process theory, which highlights the exploitation
of workers by employers. For most participants in CMS, many of the most important motivating
problems are related to the capitalist core of the prevailing economic system and this core’s articulation
with other structures of domination The focus is reflected in the official “domain statement” of the CMS-
IG: ‘’Our shared belief is that management of the modern firm (and often of other types of organizations
too) is guided by a narrow goal, profits, rather than by the interests of society as a whole, and that other
goals, justice, community, human development, ecological balance, should be brought to bear on the
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