The psychologisation of employment relations?1. John Godard*Article first published online: 16 DEC 2013DOI:10.1111/1748-8583.12030

In liberal market economies, the field of industrial relations (IR) has traditionally been the main venue for the study of all aspects of work and employment relations. Beginning in the 1960s, it increasingly came to narrow its focus to the collective relations between employers and their employees, or what may be referred to as labour relations. However, it also (especially in North America) began to be located in business schools, where unions and collective bargaining had become widely accepted as a reality of the managerial environment, and students were either required or encouraged to take at least one labour relations course (often labelled industrial relations). As a result, students came to be exposed to a pluralistic (or even radical) conception of the employment relation, and to the importance of distinctive employee rights and interests.This all began to change in the 1980s. Particularly important was the morphing of personnel into human resource management (HRM) and the corresponding popularisation of new HRM practices. The latter largely engendered a psychological approach to selection, training and performance management, and by no means represented the entire domain of the former, which (as defined here) encompasses all of HRM as a functional area, and as such has in most university programmes tended to include labour economics, labour and employment law, and labour relations as well as psychologically based courses. There was also the emergence of the high performance paradigm, which advocated the use of selected HRM practices but was much more focused on new work practices, including the establishment of autonomous teams and various employee voice systems.What makes this potential takeover of particular concern is that it has been occurring at the same time that the study of labour relations (and trade unions) has continued to be narrowed and marginalised. Again, this has been especially so in business schools, where it has now increasingly come to be viewed as, at best, a subarea of HRM. Also important, and less noticed, has been the long-since-completed takeover of OB by I-O psychologists, and the corresponding displacement of the more sociological and ethnographic orientation associated with its main progenitor, the human relations school (Whyte,1987). The result may be the gradual psychologisation of the study of not just HRM, but of employment relations in general (e.g.Sparrow and Cooper,2003).In North America, OB also became widespread during the1960s (and was perhaps even more predominant than labour relations), largely due to pressures on business schools for more behavioural courses (Strauss,2001: 878879). Subsequent to its rejection by more institutional scholars dominant in IR (Bakkeetal.,1950; Dunlop and Whyte,1950; Whyte,1987), it came to be increasingly dominated by psychological theory, although most of its contributors were broader and more heterodox than their contemporary counterparts. The main topics in OB came to include motivation, leadership, change and group dynamics, all of which had to do with employment relations, but none of which directly conflicted with those in labour relations courses even if their orientation differed massively. In the UK, OB seems to have retained a more sociological and macro orientation (e.g.Woodward,1965), which was more consistent with labour relations.Personnel management largely took a back seat to both of these areas in both practice and the academia (Strauss,2001; Kaufman,2012). Although some employers had well-developed welfare capitalist systems, the function of personnel typically involved little more than hiring, firing and payroll management, which were relatively unsophisticated, administrative roles and viewed as a maintenance function and of secondary importance (Dulebohnetal.,1995: 29; Kaufman,2004: 356). Indeed, in union employers, personnel management was largely defined by terms and conditions negotiated at the bargaining table, and in non-union employers of any size by rules and procedures that largely conformed to and often served as substitutes for those in union workplaces. Thus, personnel management was often a subarea of IR departments in both practice and academia. Personnel or industrial psychology remained a largely separate area, and was in academia typically located in psychology departments.

Based on this concern, this article addresses the process by which and reasons why the psychologisation of employment relations, and especially of HRM, appears to have been occurring and why this matters. My purpose is to provoke critical reflection and debate, and in so doing possibly help alter the current trajectory of research and teaching, in business schools in particular. Much of what I argue is conjectural and normative, and some of the ground covered is not new. Although the arguments I advance appear to have a significant empirical basis to them they are largely that: arguments. They are also based in considerable measure on the North American (and especially Canadian) experience, with which I am most familiar. In this regard, there may be important differences across even liberal market economies in view of their different institutional and ultimately academic traditions and trajectories (Frege,2003,2007; Kelly,2003). For example, it does not appear that this takeover is nearly as advanced in UK business schools likely because of these differences. However, the concerns that I raise can at minimum provide a warning to guard against, and possibly some basis for preventing, any further such development.Personnel management largely took a back seat to both of these areas in both practice and the academia (Strauss,2001; Kaufman,2012). Although some employers had well-developed welfare capitalist systems, the function of personnel typically involved little more than hiring, firing and payroll management, which were relatively unsophisticated, administrative roles and viewed as a maintenance function and of secondary importance (Dulebohnetal.,1995: 29; Kaufman,2004: 356). Indeed, in union employers, personnel management was largely defined by terms and conditions negotiated at the bargaining table, and in non-union employers of any size by rules and procedures that largely conformed to and often served as substitutes for those in union workplaces. Thus, personnel management was often a subarea of IR departments in both practice and academia. Personnel or industrial psychology remained a largely separate area, and was in academia typically located in psychology departments.As has been widely documented (e.g.Kaufman,2007,2012), this began to change in the early 1980s. In an era where unions and strike activity were accepted as normal components of capitalism, the pluralist and/or conflict perspective adopted by labour relations scholars not only came to be acceptable in business schools, it also spilled over into the study of personnel management, where the implicit concern was to maintain an orderly and stable workforce. Yet as unions and strike activity began to decline, and neoliberal ideologies ascended, so emerged the new personnel, albeit now labelled human resource management (There are a number of potential reasons why psychologisation appears to have been occurring. One is the shift in ideology and culture within society in general and business schools in particular, one that encourages the instrumental narcissism that critical theorists have warned of (Horkheimer and Adorno,1972[1947]; Lasch,1979; Casey,1995; Sherratt,2002),1and that seems especially consistent with the dominant orientation in I-O psychology, for reasons I discuss below. It may also be that I-O psychology programmes are just more attractive, especially (albeit not only) to instrumental narcissists, as they do not require students to grapple with messy and sometimes stressful economic and political issues and questions, and also do not require courses that they may find difficult to cope with in other areas of business or even in labour relations. Another possible reason is that I-O psychology tends to be attractive to business school deans, who view it as closer to the teaching of actual management skills than is the case for more educative courses, especially as those who teach it can normally be counted on not to write or say anything that might be at odds with received wisdom or cause embarrassment for student recruiters and fund-raisers. Indeed, they are, for this reason, often ideal as executive educators and external liaisons to the business community.2At the heart of these developments, however, would seem to be the research paradigm that has increasingly come to dominate and even define I-O psychology over the past few decades. I-O psychologists essentially seek to emulate the pure science paradigm, not just ontologically (see below), but methodologically. Their research has six important components, all of which are largely consistent with this paradigm and ultimately with instrumental narcissism: (a) multiple authorships, with an extensive division of labour; (b) small-scale research questions; (c) extensive reliance on experimental research or survey methods, typically using students; (d) fixation on data analysis techniques, creating the appearance of scientific sophistication; (e) extensive citation of other work; and (f) an absence of reflexivity.This means that I-O psychologists tend to have high publication rates (multiple authorships seem increasingly to be given similar status to single authorships), their journals tend to have high impact factors, and their articles tend to have high citation rates just as in the physical sciences. These are, at best, limited indicators or measures of one's real contribution to knowledge, but this has come to matter less and less as business schools in particular have found themselves increasingly competing for external donations and having to rely on various ranking systems in order to establish their reputation which have of course also grown in importance over the past decade or two. So it does not matter whether the actual work produced is of social value, or if the research fails to account for meaningful amounts of variance, or if the results are inconsistent and inconclusive (e.g.see Holton,1998[1978]). Nor does it matter whether the researcher has ever been in a real workplace or does research with real employees, even though this formed the essence of research in the field of OB in particular in earlier times (this is in part why it was more sociological).

Reflections:

The argument in this article may be accused of conflating theory with practice. There are undoubtedly many with I-O psychology backgrounds who are less interested in manipulating workers to managerial ends than in helping create the conditions for a higher quality of work experience and a productive working life. There are also many who do not fully adhere to the scientised research paradigm that seems to have become predominant, and even among those who do, many who may have misgivings about this paradigm even if they are not sure why. There is also reason to question the extent to which psychologisation has occurred or will occur. Yet, to the extent that the essential concern of this article is justified, it portends a worrying future, not just for non-psychologists working in the areas of HR, and more generally employment relations, but also for employer practices, for those subject to these practices, and ultimately (and on many levels) for society.The underlying problem with a psychologised HRM is not, however, just one of theory or ideology. Rather, it is one of ontology, epitomising the worst fears that have been raised about positivism. Contemporary I-O psychologists do not just emulate the research paradigm of the physical sciences, they also tend to emulate (or at least attempt to) an idealised version of the ontology often mistakenly associated with the physical sciences (Bhaskar,1975). As a result, their research is not just positivist (e.g.in the traditional sense of this term, la Durkheim) but also scientistic or hyper-positivist, and as such directed at prediction and control rather than understanding (Harney,2009; Fleetwood and Hesketh,2010). In their research, I-O psychologists seem to view human beings almost as if they are billiard balls, subject to rather simple laws of behaviour and with no capacity for independent thought or action (or at least, there is no interest in this capacity). Under this view, it is possible to develop elaborate models, with numerous arrows and boxes (and, with the advent of structural equation modelling, ovals), and then to test these models with carefully developed research instruments consisting of endless questions asking about multiple individual-level attitudes and characteristics and with highly sophisticated measurement and data analysis. In order to do so, it is necessary to abstract the subject from human society, and most important the realities of the employment relation, giving rise to endless surveys and experimental studies of students that often have little real correspondence to the world of employment and may explain only a small amount of variation. In turn, unexplained variation simply reflects a problem with model specification and data collection rather than the intellectual poverty of the field.As noted earlier, this method has a number of pragmatic advantages and helps explain the growing dominance and even displacement of HRM by I-O psychology. The problem, however, is not just the method, but also, and more important, the mindset that accompanies it. Quantitative methods can be of value if researchers do not overspecify their models or presume that they can provide more than crude representations of a more complex social reality (Godard,1994). Too often, however, I-O psychologists do not seem to appreciate this. The result can be a tendency to objectify the subjects of their research. These subjects by definition have internal qualities (e.g.personality), and I-O psychologists clearly study these qualities. But they often seem to do so in the same way that a physicist would explore the internal qualities of a billiard ball, in order to establish how these qualities matter to the way in which the object of study responds to external stimuli. It does not matter that the results may be weak and inconsistent. As in physics, the response is to call for better measures, better instruments, better methods, and ultimately better funding and even big science (Harney,2009).The risk is that human beings come to be viewed as objects to be manipulated, and especially in the case of industrial psychology, disciplined and controlled. It is, in this respect, no coincidence that the field has the words resource and management as part of its nomenclature. The term human has even in some cases disappeared, as evidenced by so-called resource-based theories of organisations. So scientism comes to be embedded not just in the way research is conducted, but also in the way the subjects of that research are viewed. We might argue that this has long occurred with respect to cults, and that the rise of religious extremism may be attributable to the loss of any sense of self in modern (capitalist) societies, but the new HRM takes this further because it essentially requires that individuals self-alienate in order to achieve success in the labour market. In a sense, they for all intents and purposes actually become the billiard balls that scientism implicitly assumes them to be, effectively negating conventional critiques of this form of positivism. It also means that the subjects come to expect and even desire a totalitarian and repressive regime one in which voice mechanisms may exist, but entirely to serve the interests of the regime (as per my earlier example), so that anybody who desires a real voice mechanism or voices real concerns is likely to be ostracised by co-workers and ultimately encouraged to exit the organisation because of poor person-organisation fit.

Article ReviewHRM ISubmitted to:Dr. Marilyn D. Yap RN, MAN, F.P.C.H.A.

Prepared by:Serie Grace D. Cortez RNMAN -1