Human Resource
OWT.223
2013
ADDITIONAL NOTES
HOW DID HRM BEGIN? M ANAGEMENT IN THE 1970S AND 1980S:
THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE EMERGENCE OF ‘HR M’ AS WE
KNOW IT
Human Resource Management has developed its original programme in the 1980s, it has expanded and consolidated its agenda in the 1990s, and it has been flourishing explosively in the dozen years since the turn of the millennium (the 2000s so far). We will try to understand the conditions of possibility for the rise of HRM in terms of cultural background, economic and political conditions, and social transformations in North Atlantic societies at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. HRM’s evolution over time shows that it has become intensified, that it has expanded its sphere both within work organisations and beyond them, and that its current shape makes it one of the most important managerial phenomena of the
20th century.
From relatively modest beginnings in the 1980s, HRM has become in the 2000s the key platform of managerialism in the age of what we term, alongside others (Heelas – reading for seminar 1), soft capitalism. The notion of soft capitalism is used to indicate that the main dimension of HRM, as well as of other managerial discourses, is the centrality of the human subject, of the Self, as the essential determination (locus) of the modern sense of work, production, and consumption
(Costea, Crump, Amiridis – reading for seminar 1). Put much more simply, the context of which
HRM is part is the Century of the Self – the century of the ‘Me, Me, Me’ generations always in search of Maslowian self-actualisation. The underlying mechanism of HRM lies in what Tipton called the ‘ethics of self-work’ (discussed by Heelas), or what we term the therapeutic habitus of the modern self (introduced by Costea, Crump and Amiridis1).
So, how did it all begin?
The cultural, economic, political and social circumstances of the 1980s (and from then onward) led to a fundamental
2013
ADDITIONAL NOTES
HOW DID HRM BEGIN? M ANAGEMENT IN THE 1970S AND 1980S:
THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE EMERGENCE OF ‘HR M’ AS WE
KNOW IT
Human Resource Management has developed its original programme in the 1980s, it has expanded and consolidated its agenda in the 1990s, and it has been flourishing explosively in the dozen years since the turn of the millennium (the 2000s so far). We will try to understand the conditions of possibility for the rise of HRM in terms of cultural background, economic and political conditions, and social transformations in North Atlantic societies at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. HRM’s evolution over time shows that it has become intensified, that it has expanded its sphere both within work organisations and beyond them, and that its current shape makes it one of the most important managerial phenomena of the
20th century.
From relatively modest beginnings in the 1980s, HRM has become in the 2000s the key platform of managerialism in the age of what we term, alongside others (Heelas – reading for seminar 1), soft capitalism. The notion of soft capitalism is used to indicate that the main dimension of HRM, as well as of other managerial discourses, is the centrality of the human subject, of the Self, as the essential determination (locus) of the modern sense of work, production, and consumption
(Costea, Crump, Amiridis – reading for seminar 1). Put much more simply, the context of which
HRM is part is the Century of the Self – the century of the ‘Me, Me, Me’ generations always in search of Maslowian self-actualisation. The underlying mechanism of HRM lies in what Tipton called the ‘ethics of self-work’ (discussed by Heelas), or what we term the therapeutic habitus of the modern self (introduced by Costea, Crump and Amiridis1).
So, how did it all begin?
The cultural, economic, political and social circumstances of the 1980s (and from then onward) led to a fundamental