REFLECTIVE PAPER

Reflective Paper

Reflective Paper

Identification of the Main Issues

The introduction of Human Resource departments represents a distinct shift from the kind of “self-management” that characterized workplaces in many countries. Decisions on such matters as organization of work, employment, dismissals, recruitment, incentives and remuneration were under the control of various commissions, committees, workers' councils and other self-management bodies. In these contexts, institutional personnel departments had only administrative functions and had very little decision-making capacity and virtually no involvement in the overall running of the enterprise. The transition to capitalism changed the entire context of organizational functioning, introducing a whole new set of demands on the workers, enacted through human resources management. The issues that would be covered in the topic are EEO and Affirmative Action, Human resources Planning, Recruitment, and Selection. The other elements would be Human resources development, Compensation and Benefits, Safety and Health, and Employee and Labor relations.

Demonstration of New Learning

In the span of just several years, the new, 'human resource' type of management became institutionalized in the majority of the companies, regardless of size, maturity or industrial sector. While some HR departments still retain the personnel function prevalent in socialism (essentially dealing only with administrative functions of record-keeping, many, mostly foreign owned companies, have implemented the Western management models in which HR is an integral part of company's overall business strategy. In these models, the scope and nature of activities go beyond just administrative duties and include practices related to the major functions of HRM. These practices, as this study is designed to explore, implicate new forms of employee regulation, allowing companies to place new demands and expectations on the workers as companies pursue their objectives of greater productivity, profitability and efficiency (Kalleberg, 1994).

A historical look at the changes in the nature of organization of work in general characterized by smaller and more 'flexible' workforce, team- and project oriented work processes, decentralization, life-long learning, and others), and work regulation in particular (i.e., processes of employee monitoring and control) have amplified the importance of workplace identity processes. Because of the greater subjectification of work, meaning an 'intensified consideration and involvement of the subjectivity of workers in the work processes' and stronger emphasis on the building of workplace 'cultures', the role of managerially-devised normative subjectivities has been increasingly implicated in the processes of self-constitution of individuals within organizational contexts. However, while establishing the extended reach of managerial interests to shape the employees' 'insides,' these studies do not tell us much about the processes through which such regulation may occur. The most productive line of inquiry to address these questions has focused on the mediating role of official (i.e., top management-devised) organizational discourses in the processes of employee identity- and subjectivity-constitution (Gelade, 2003).

Activities that facilitates learning

Previous research has also drawn attention to how such processes of self identification with the normative forms of subjectivities are 'helped along' by various Human resource management techniques. Mostly conducted from Foucault-inspired perspectives, these studies re-inscribe the HRM techniques as a set of regulatory practices ...