Scand. J. Mgmt, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 295-309, 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain
Pergamon
BOOK REVIEWS
Refraining Human Resource Management. Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work, by Barbara Townley (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 213 pp., ISBN 0-8039-8493-6.
In Reframing Human Resource Management, Barbara Townley conducts a Foucauldian analysis of Human Resource Management (HRM) and personnel management. This reviewer was a bit disappointed that Refraining Human Resource Management does not join the discussion about the "newness" of HRM in relation to personnel management and Industrial Relations (e.g. Guest, 1987, 1990; Legge, 1989; Blyton and Turnbull, 1992). Townley focuses instead on the similarities of techniques in the area rather than noting the differences between practices. In sum I found this book refreshing and inspiring. I am not a Foucauldian but the book has great value as a means of broadening the inquiry. Research in HRM and personnel management is dominated by narrowly defined agendas of normative research in a spirit of"human engineering". Townley doesn't try to advocate any particular kind of personality test that is the best, but seeks to discover the hidden assumptions on which personality tests are based, and the consequences of personality tests as instruments of power and knowledge. This is of course a refreshing counter-point which gives HRM researchers an opportunity to reflect. Reframing Human Resource Management analyses different HRM practices which are seen as techniques for gaining control over the employees and making them more manageable. The book is firmly grounded in mainstream research and the reference list includes some 600 works. On the other hand Barbara Townley has not carded out an empirical study of her own. The book is divided into six clearly focused chapters. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive presentation of Foucault's central ideas. Foucault points out that over time, human institutions become taken-for-granted and self-evident. Townley writes: The first lesson to be drawn from Foucault's work is that areas of knowledge, the boundaries of a discipline, are not given; they are constructed. This raises several questions for the study of HRM. How is HRM constructed? What is the theoretical coherence which has defined or circumscribed the boundaries of HRM? What is the effect of constructing the subject in a particular way? To what has our attention been directed, and from what has it been averted? What are the limits of the seeable and the sayable within the discourse of HRM? (pp. 2-3) Central to Foucauldian analysis is the close relationship between power and knowledge, which are seen as two sides of the same coin. In order to control, knowledge is needed about those who are to be controlled. Certain techniques, "discoursive practices", are developed in order to obtain "governmentality". The focus is how power is exercised, not who possesses it. The following chapter is about "dividing" (classifying) practices. "Taxinomia" refers to the science of classification and tabulation, and "mathesis" to the establishment of an order through measurement. The practice of closing off ("enclosure") work from non-work, the practice of 295
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partitioning the work organization and the ranking of partitions are all analysed. Job evaluation, for instance, is criticized for devaluing many female-dominated jobs, and the practice of performance appraisal is institutionalized despite the fact that any attempts to measure competence in a "scientific" manner are highly problematic. Chapter 3 discusses techniques for controlling activity in organizations. Job analysis, the subdivision of time, and management-by-objectives are seemingly neutral and natural methods in working life. Townley shows that knowledge about these phenomena is systematically ordered, in a way that makes organizations manageable and restricts the ability of both managers and managed to think in new ways. HRM techniques that construct individuals as objects is the topic of Chapter 4. It is a basic assumption of HRM that the individual has an observable and stable identity. Townley argues that the individual does not have a given identity, but that identity is actively produced in social action. Selection practices, the use of personality and intelligence tests and assessment centres are analysed as tools for making individuals calculable and manageable. Townley criticizes these practices, to which scientific and objective status is attributed, for making the unrealistic assumption that the individual and the work are two separate and independent units. Both the work and the individual are created in action according to the Foucauldian view. Chapter 5 analyses how individuals actively constitute their identities by adopting knowledge that has been constructed elsewhere. Townley examines HRM techniques which constitute the identity of the individual worker: attitude surveys, selection interviews, self-assessment (which plays a confessional role), employee development, mentoring (a technique for reconstituting the subject) and, finally, the constitution of the productive subject through techniques such as employee assistance programmes, quality circles, profit-sharing and employee share ownership. The last chapter represents an attempt to develop an emancipatory agenda. Towniey argues for less gender-biased job evaluations, more subordinate appraisals, realistic job previews, the rejection of technocracy, more employment equity and non-hierarchical social relations. It is easy to agree with her suggestion for more equality and better working conditions. But the question is, why have such appealing ideas not yet been implemented? Townley tries to answer this question, and cites the difficulty of succeeding with large-scale social reforms. Michael Foucault argues that change must start from the individual. By adopting a personal strategy of non-domination we can all contribute to the emancipatory agenda. Leadership, power and knowledge must merge with ethics: how does one act? Barbara Townley is obviously a talented researcher, engaged in questions central to HRM research, but there seems to be potential dangers in being a "Foucanldian". Foucault's theories provide a powerful tool for analysing and deconstructing empirical phenomena, but the genius of his historical studies, as regards both creativity and presentation, could easily lead to unfair comparisons, in which the Foucault-inspired study would hardly ever be able to match the quality of the originals. Barbara Townley's achievement lies more in hard professional work than in unexpected or creative insights. It is not easy to follow in the footpaths of the great social thinkers; they cast long shadows. Refraining Human Resource Management focuses exclusively on HRM techniques, not on how ideas are shaped and diffused, or how people construct their reality. There is still plenty of work to do in investigating where the ideas of the HRM movement come from, how the ideas were diffused, and how practitioners adapt and reproduce HRM, both as a subject for academic inquiry and as a way of developing its practices. In my view Foucanlt-inspired research is a promising complement to other constructionist perspectives, that focus on the creation of meaning in organizational life, and some knowledge regarding Foucault's ideas and methods are a
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must for interpretative researchers in social science. This book is fairly easy to understand, and therefore it is useful for graduate students in related subjects. Barbara Townley uses the work of other researchers as her empirical material. I believe that additional field-studies are needed for the further development of a Foucauldian view on Human Resource Management. Alternative perspectives also need to construct empirical data on their own terms. Stefan Tengblad
Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI) REFERENCES Blyton, P. and Turnbull, P., Reassessing Human resource management (London: Sage Publications, 1992). Guest, D. E., Human resource management and industrial relations, Journal of Management Studies (1987), pp. 503-521. Guest, D. E., Human resource management and the American dream, Journal of Management Studies (1990), pp. 377-397. l_¢gge, K., Human resource management: a critical analysis. In: J. Storey (Ed.), New Perspective on Human Resource Management (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-55.
Emotion in Organizations, edited by Stephen Fineman (London: Sage, 1993), 230 pp., cloth and paperback.
A first reaction to Emotion in Organizations is a feeling of wonderment that this topic - - in a sense very old, but in the sense of being a distinct topic of organization theory discourse, quite young - - has succeeded in moving so far so fast. From a simplistic "the rational-organizationsuppresses-emotions" view, it has moved as demonstrated by the present anthology to the notion of the "emotional organization", that is to say, a view of organizations as arenas where emotions are produced, fabricated, managed and exploited. While the earlier view, for all its good intentions, tended to simplify organizations, to reduce emotions and to patronize people as organizational dupes, the present view reveals all the complexity of organization-related emotions, the ambiguity of their meaning and the strategic uses of their expression. As usual it is difficult to do justice to an edited book without making a review sound like an annotated shopping list. Let me then choose some of those chapters I found most attractive, while acknowledging that attraction varies from one reader to another, with the general aim of waking an interest in the book as a whole. Heather Hrpfl and Steve Linstead ("Passion and Performance: Suffering and the Carrying of Organizational Roles") use a dramatistic frame to analyse what can be called the production and management of organizational commitment. Combining vivid scenes from organizational reality with an insightful theoretical commentary, they show how, in the course of an organizational career, the feeling of enchantment and exultation gives way to disenchantment and frustration. At this stage, if they lack alternatives, people find comfort in a "common humiliation" or else in perfecting the "emotional play". As various team members might find themselves at different stages in their organizational biographies, gaps and holes abound in the "texture of organizing". Hrpfl and Linstead give an interesting example of "corpsing" a situation in the theatre where an actor temporarily falls out of a role and is helped out by
