Foucauldian Studies and Hrm

Foucauldian Studies and HRM

Chenchen Liu

Abstract When discussing and analyzing the nature of human resource management, Foucault, who not studying HRM, gives us much space to think about HRM in different ways. His theory on discourse, power and knowledge greatly influence the studies on HRM. This paper will follow Foucauldian studies on HRM, discussing three contributions Foucauldianism studies on HRM including HRM as discourse, HRM and power, and an essential part of HRM, employee selection. Based on Foucualdian studies, individuals can have new understandings on HRM, both in theoretical and practical field.
Keywords: human resource management, discourse, power, employee selection.

Introduction
When considering about human resource management (HRM) being understood as discourse, it is necessary to connect Foucault’ s theory on discourse with employee selection as a crucial part of human resource management. Though Foucault himself not a specialist in HRM, it appears that numerous organization studies scholars tend to drawn on Foucault’s ideas for the purpose of re-analyzing and re-understanding HRM. (Barrantt, 2001) The reason is that Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between discourse, truth and power implies how we should regard HRM from different perspective and put it into re-consideration. Generally, discourse could be understand as ‘ a set of concepts, expressions and statements that constitutes a way of talking or writing about an aspect of the world, thus framing the way people understand and act with regard to that aspect of the world’ (Watson, 2002: 118). And in Foucault’s view, discourse is a flexible term. In one of Foucault’ s book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, published in 1969, was an outstanding work of post-structuralism example. He believes that discourse is a statement unity. It talks about the statement (énoncé), which is a rule for the discursive expression

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