ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique

Article Critique

Objective

This paper is an article critique of “Personnel And Paradigms: Four Perspectives On The Future” written by Gowler, Dan and Legge, Karen. This article examines the relevance of this article in the present day management paradigms.

Introduction

In the article Personnel and Paradigms, the Personnel emerged as a welfare function acting as a brake on the worst employment practices of private companies, supported by society, legislation and the more philanthropic end of the capitalist spectrum. Personnel managers, like other professionals, tended to be loyal to their professional codes first and their employer second. Just as an accountant who bent the accounting rules for the convenience of upper management risked sanction by the profession, the same was true of personnel managers. Personnel managers had responsibility for making their employers treat employees within the employment law. For this, they were sometimes regarded by other managers as not part of the management team, and many commentators pointed out personnel was not where the power is in an organisation (Gowler & Karen, 2007)

Analsyis

Gowler and Karen demonstrated that the shift from personnel management to HRM in the 1980s brought about a change in both the rhetoric and reality of the personnel profession, though the extent of the change in reality is open to some debate. The wider argument of this paper by Gowler & Karen is that HRM practices need careful empirical study and such studies need to be informed by relevant social methods and theoretical perspectives. In terms of methods, longitudinal studies of cases are required simply in order to document and describe how HR practices work in practice because HR practices work on long cycles of activity. Whether a new performance management system, or job evaluation system, for instance, makes a difference to organisational effectiveness and efficiency is not something that becomes clear in a single year, so longitudinal research is needed on a case by case basis.

A more contentious issue concerns by Gowler & Karen is the kind of theory or perspective needed to frame the data collection and analysis. In considering the theoretical options, a basic question is whether to assume that HRM is part of a unified management group justified by a managerialist ideology or not. We think that HR practices need to be studied without making this presumption. However, we think that the study of specific HRM practices cannot proceed without understanding them within a socially situated organisational context, including its relations with other managers and management groups and their activities.

Both of the authors have experience of working in HRM and one of them conducted the longitudinal study which we report here, which is based on eighteen months of participant observation in a large operating unit of an international chemicals firm which was bought from the parent company by another international chemicals firm during the period of study.

Gowler & Karen study is focus on the role of the HR manager in these processes and our discussion will draw implications for the kinds ...