Are Humans Resources?

Career Development International
Are humans resources?

Kerr Inkson,
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CDI
13,3 Are humans resources?
Kerr Inkson
Waikato Management School, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
270 Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to offer a critique, from a career studies perspective, of the common term
“human resource management.”
Design/methodology/approach – Provides a literature review and critique.
Findings – The term “human resource management” is a metaphor that presents employees as
passive commodities or assets rather than as active agents, and thereby potentially de-humanizes
them. In an alternative view based on career studies, individual employees are active agents utilizing
the resources of employing organizations to pursue personal goals. Alternative terms to “human
resource management” are suggested.
Research limitations/implications – There is scope for study of the effects of “human resources”
terminology on employees’ and others’ view of and attitude to the human resource management
function.
Practical implications – Examination of “human resources” discourse may promote examination
of the implications of current discourse for practice, facilitate moderation of practice, and stimulate the
search for new discourse and new practice, by both organizations and individuals.
Originality/value – This paper questions a prevailing and widely accepted form of discourse in
management and advocates change.
Keywords Human resource management, Careers, Metaphors
Paper type Viewpoint
Introduction
“Human resource management” has really caught on as a burgeoning area of
management and as a favorite topic of business students, many of whom, in their early
20s, are very keen to become what they call “aitch-arr managers”. I feel my skin
crawling slightly. Is that what we are – resources?
A resource is:
The means available to achieve an end, fulfill a function or a stock or supply that can be
drawn on (Allen, 1996).
In common usage of the term, therefore, resources are passive objects to be utilized by
superior agents. Thus:
. . . to call a person a resource is already to tread dangerously close to placing that human in
the same category with office furniture and computers (Greenwood, 2002, p. 261).
This article is adapted from K. Inkson, “Are humans resources? A view from career studies”, a
paper presented at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management, Canberra,
Career Development International
Vol. 13 No. 3, 2008 December 2005, where it won the Best Paper Award in the stream of Human Resource
pp. 270-279 Management, sponsored by Latrobe University Faculty of Law and Management. The author is
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1362-0436
grateful to Ken Parry for his encouragement of the development of this paper, and to Michael
DOI 10.1108/13620430810870511 Arthur for a commentary that enabled substantial improvements to be made.
Unlike office furniture and computers, of course, employees are often free to negotiate Are humans
their terms of employment with the employer, and free to leave and join competing resources?
organizations if they choose. So why do we term them “resources”?
The term “resource” is a metaphor. And since Morgan’s (1986) seminal work on
Images of Organization, metaphors have enjoyed increasing use as a means of
organizational analysis (e.g. Cornelisson, 2005). Multiple metaphors denote multiple
shades of meaning, multiple realities. Conversely, a single metaphor – such as human 271
resource – employed consistently in discourse can lead to stereotypical images of its
referents. But “resource” is only one metaphor among many that one might apply to
people working in organizations. Alternatives frequently heard in organizational
discourse are “troops”, “team”, “family”, “loyal company servants”, and “labor force”.
Each of these, like “human resources”, refers to the employees of an organization. Yet
each has quite different connotations from the others. Why has the organizational
world chosen to standardize around the “resource” metaphor, and what are the
implications?
The point is not trivial. Some might argue, “what does it matter what we call it, as
long as everyone knows what it means?” But the words we use substantially influence
our perceptions of the world, and our actions. The notion of “resource” creates its own
discourse both at work and across society. The discourse of employees as integrated
components in a broad mass of “human resources” is now commonplace, in academic
as well as in business and popular media. The more we are told we are resources, the
more managers – the users of resources – and employees may come to accept it, and to
behave accordingly. While I have anecdotal evidence that some HR managers are
concerned about the issue and often discuss it, the academic community, surprisingly
for the supposed “critic and conscience of society”, has had little to say about it. The
purpose of this short paper, therefore, is to question the human resource metaphor and
associated discourse, and to seek alternatives.
The resource-based view of the firm

The idea that people can and should be managed by organizations as resources is best
embodied academically in the theoretical position known as the resource-based view of
the firm (Wright et al., 2001; Boxall and Purcell, 2003). According to this view, a firm’s
competitive advantage is based on the strategic accumulation and deployment of
unique bundles of resources. While a firm’s physical resources, such as finance and
plant, are part of the mix, in a knowledge-based economy its people-based “core
competencies” are critical. Note, however, that it is not the person that is the real
resource, but the knowledge and expertise the person possesses:
Capabilities evolve and must be managed dynamically in pursuit of above-average returns . . .
core competencies developed, nurtured and applied in the firm may result in strategic
competitiveness (Hill et al., 2004, p. 20).
Metaphorically, employees are therefore the compost in a kind of hothouse in which the
employer can grow, or perhaps breed, competencies for profit. It is knowledge, skills,
and capabilities that are the real resources:
Employees are viewed as a capital resource that requires investment . . . people are perhaps
the only sustainable source of competitive advantage . . . when human capital investments are
successful . . . continuous learning and leveraging the firm’s expanding knowledge base are
CDI linked with strategic success . . . viewing employees as a resource to be maximized rather
than a cost to be minimized facilitates the successful implementation of a firm’s strategies
13,3 (Hill et al., 2003, pp. 397 – 398).
Being recognized as an asset rather than a cost is, for ordinary employees, admittedly a
step in the right direction. But somehow the quote above attributes all power to the
mighty, knowledgeable investor-organization, and none to the energy, innovation and
272 enterprise of employees. Maybe employers invest in employees, and shareholders have
a legitimate expectation of maximization of value from the investment. But employees
invest in their organizations too. If I am to contribute to the competitive advantage of
my employing organization, I want to do so not as an asset invested in, but as an
investor who actively chooses to do so for my own profit, intrinsic as well as material.
The use of the term “human resource” suggests that the employee is part of the
company’s stock, which can be drawn on, and developed, for organizational ends. The
focus in management texts is on the development of a system – “HR planning”, “HR
development” etc. – to access, mobilize and process the combined resources embodied
in employees and direct them towards meeting organizational goals. The competencies
managers seek to capture and develop by these means extend to the integration of
different employees’ capabilities within the broader organization, for example through
teamwork, managerial systems, and company culture (Leonard, 1998), and the
fostering of social capital through employees’ networks (Fernandez and Castilla, 2000).
Thus individual employees become conceptualized not even as resources in their own
right, but as components integrated within a broader resource.
As far as implementation is concerned, Marchington and Wilkinson (2005) compare
the “hard” and “soft” models of HRM (see also Legge, 1995). In the “hard” model:
The human resource is seen as similar to all other resources – land and capital for example –
being used as management sees fit. Under this scenario, which stresses the “resource” aspect
of HRM – there is no pretence that labor has anything other than commodity status . . .
(Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005, p. 6).
Some commentators argue for the “soft” model of HRM, which “requires managers to
engender commitment and loyalty in order to ensure high levels of performance”
(Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005, p. 6). But even here the language bespeaks
passivity by the employee. It is managers who “engender” commitment and “ensure”
performance, not employees who actively commit and perform. Many models and
practices of HRM, of course, focus on improving organizational performance while
simultaneously bettering the lot of employees (e.g. Pfeffer, 1998). But Greenwood (2002)
notes that “many skeptical commentators have suggested that ‘soft HRM’ is just ‘hard
HRM’ in disguise” (p. 264), and argues that the question is “not whether HRM is ethical,
but whether it can be ethical” (p. 261). And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that
HR experts themselves have considerable concerns about the utilitarian and
depersonalizing aspects of their underlying philosophies, rhetoric and practice
(Storey, 2001).
A view from career studies

In recent years I have focused my research on career studies. As I have shown
elsewhere, careers too can be considered as resources, but there are many other
metaphorical formulations of career underpinning different career theories and
practices – for example one’s career can be considered as an inheritance, a cycle, Are humans
action, fit, a journey, a series of roles, a set of relationships, or a story (Inkson, 2004, resources?
2007). Some of these alternative metaphors – for example action, journey, story –
enable the individual to conceptualize him or herself as playing a more active part in
the creation of the career than does the resource metaphor.
Considering and researching careers within a business school environment is
therefore a satisfyingly subversive activity. Whereas organizational behavior and 273
HRM typically construct a view of individuals from the perspective of the organization
(e.g. how do we, the organization, motivate and lead individuals to contribute to our
company goals?), career studies encourages construction of a view of organizations
from the perspective of the individual (e.g. how do I, the individual, motivate and
influence organizations to contribute to my personal goals?).
Careers are important in relation to human resource management, because
examining careers over time enables one to see how resources can accumulate for
organizational benefit as a result of learning. An organization that hires a new

employee or contractor gains access to capabilities that that person has assembled over
a series of prior educational, work and other life experiences. Organizations therefore
hire and manage people as repositories of knowledge with learning capabilities (Bird,
1996). They seek to protect those resources by offering employees long-term
organizational careers, to grow those resources by providing them with
organizationally-relevant learning, and to deploy those resources for organizational
benefit. Thus:
A career does not exist in a social vacuum but is in many ways directed by the employer’s
staffing priorities (Sonnenfeld, 1989, p. 202).
This formulation epitomizes the resource-based view of careers, asserts managerial
control over employees and potentially disempowers them by attempting to
expropriate their careers from them.
Here, there is a disjuncture between two careers literatures (see Gunz and Peiperl,
2007, for discussion). On one hand, the extensive HRM literature already referred to
employs corporate notions about “career management” (i.e. organizational
management of individual employees’ careers) and the use of committed human
resources to secure competitive advantage. It is written in business schools, from the
perspective of the organization, for a clientele of managers (e.g. Baruch, 2004).
On the other hand, there is a considerable, and in fact much larger, literature about
career choice and career development produced in schools of psychology, education
and counseling, from the perspective of the individual, for a clientele of educators and
career counselors (e.g. Brown, 2002). The latter literature focuses on the psychology of
careers and the empowerment of the individual to appraise the world of employment
(just as strategic managers appraise the world of business), and to use rational choices
in pursuit of personal satisfaction and success. In this latter view of careers,
organizations scarcely rate a mention. Instead the assumption is made that individuals
control their own careers. Employees believe this too (Arthur et al., 1999).
Nowadays the business school literature in career studies is increasingly influenced
by theories of self-directed “protean careers” (Hall 2002) and “boundaryless careers”
(Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). These theories are based on their own metaphors of
human behavior within and between organizations (Inkson, 2006), and provide a good
CDI account of career behavior in prototypical “new economy” situations such as
13,3 project-based enterprise, contract work, and self-employment, and also show how
workers can use their self-directed acquisition of valued skills and wide networks to
develop new forms of career independently of employing organizations (Arthur et al.,
1999). It is not that individuals are resources, more that they possess resources, which
they may or may not choose to share with the organization and develop within it.
274
Changing views of HRM
There are signs that the field of human resource management is also beginning to
recognize the new realities. For example, in successive editions of his textbook of HRM,
Cascio (1995, 1998, 2003) has moved from:
A career is not something that should be left to each employee: instead it should be managed
by the organization to ensure the efficient allocation of human and capital resources (Cascio,
1995, p. 310, italics added)

to:
A key feature of the new concept is that the company and the employee are partners in career
development (Cascio, 1998, p. 308, italics added).
And then to:
A career is not something that should be left to chance. Instead, in the evolving world of work
it should be shaped and managed more by the individual than by the organization (Cascio,
2003, p. 373, italics added).
The changing formulation suggests some rapid reconsideration of the issue of who
should be in charge of the career. And in another standard HR textbook Stone (2005,
pp. 370-407) reduces the “HR department’s responsibility” for career planning and
development to eight lines of text, and then devotes 10,000 words or so to individual
strategies (including golf!) for promoting career success. But if each individual is in
such active management of his or her own work life, is it any longer possible to
consider that person as a passive resource?
Practical implications
Individuals
Organizations often provide their employees with massive opportunities for personal
development, for example through strategic staffing, systematic selection and training,
promotions, staff development, appraisal and assessment, and career development
(Baruch, 2004). Thus, in an era of growing employee control of scarce career-based
knowledge resources, the counterpoint of the employee’s career being a resource
available to the organization in reaching its organizational goals, is that the
organization is a resource available to the employee in reaching his or her personal
goals. This is true even if the career is destined eventually to move outside that
particular organization. If organizations insist on considering employees primarily as
resources rather than as partners, then they cannot complain if employees take the
same approach to them.
HR management Are humans
The typical HR response to the growing power and energy of knowledge workers is resources?
one of accommodation. HR texts nowadays advocate the organization providing a
supportive context for careers within which individuals may make their own choices.
Organizational interests are protected through a unitarist perspective that asserts a
comforting convergence of employer and employee interests. Thus:
Ideally, career planning and development should be seen as a process that aligns the interests 275
and skills of the employee with the needs of the organization. This means careers must be
managed strategically so the skills demanded by the organization’s business objectives are
understood (by the employee) and a workforce with a matching profile of skills is developed
(Stone, 2005, p. 372).
But even this apparently even-handed statement subtly tilts toward acceptance of
organizational control of the relationship. It is the employee who must bend his or her
career to match the corporation’s superior plans. In the knowledge economy, employees
with scarce skills do not have to accept such a contract and might seek to rewrite it
thus:
Ideally, personal planning and development should be seen as a process that aligns the
activities and competencies of the organization with the needs of employees. This means
career opportunities must be managed strategically (by individuals) so the experiences
demanded by their career goals are understood by the organization and a business with a
matching profile of opportunities is developed.
This statement means that managers may increasingly have to structure organizations
around the careers and objectives of the people they want, not the other way round
(Miles and Snow, 1996).
Three recent books support such a view. Rousseau’s (2005) I-Deals focuses the
power that individual employees have to utilize their own power to negotiate personal
arrangements for their working conditions and development, spells out the notion of
idiosyncratic deals (or “I” deals), and explores the implications for workplace justice
and for HR management. At a more macro-level, Higgins’ (2006) Career Imprints shows
how a single organization – Baxter – spawned a whole generation of biotechnology
companies by imprinting in its employees a conceptualization of entrepreneurship,
strategy and structure that they carried with them in their ongoing boundaryless
careers and used in the spawning of new companies: a classic case of careers creating
organizations structures rather than the other way round. And in sharp contrast to the
conventional picture of organizations utilizing their own staff and competing
aggressively against each other in the management of knowledge, DeFillippi et al.’s
(2006) Knowledge at Work puts forward the notion of a “knowledge diamond”
consisting of four parties – community, industry, organization and individual – such
that each interacts interdependently with the others in knowledge creation,
development and utilization. Strategic and HR managers would do well to read such
books and consider the implications of such concepts for their theory and practice.
There has been recent speculation about the relationship between organizational
career management (OCM) and career self-management by the individual (CSM)
(Sturges et al., 2002), with one suggestion being that far from being in opposition to
each other the two can be combined, in well-managed organizations, into a “virtuous
circle” of complementary career management activities (Sturges et al., 2002). Such a
CDI scenario, however, suggests that managers, including HR managers, need to become
13,3 more conscious of the proactivity and idiosyncrasy of much current career behavior.
While the need for organizations to conduct strategic planning in terms of considering
long-term resources and to implement actions in pursuit of these plans is accepted, so
too must be the reality that employees have an equal right of control over their own
lives. In this scenario, the HR manager is not a manger of resources, but of
276 relationships.
Research
A weakness in this critique is that it is impressionistic. Neither I nor, to my knowledge,
others, have conducted studies on the prevalence and nature of human resource
discourses or its effects on managerial or employee perceptions of their roles and
relationships. Given the burgeoning popularity of studies of various forms of
organizational discourse (Grant et al., 2004), this is somewhat surprising. Similarly the
field of career studies contains only a few studies that comment critically on the
pervasive discourses of career in everyday life (Gowler and Legge, 1989; Hirsch and
Shanley, 1996). The prevalence of competing rhetorical discourses in everyday life,
advocating on the one hand orderly organizational careers mediated by human
resource management, and on the other liberated boundaryless careers pursued by
autonomous individuals, is surely worthy of further investigation.
Nomenclature
Should the name “human resource management” be changed? Indeed, is it an issue
worth spending time on? A reviewer of a previous version of this paper states that “this
is a topic I have heard discussed at HR conferences for years”, indicating that at least
some practitioners think so. What is more surprising is the almost universal and totally
unquestioning acceptance of the term and its underlying discourse and practice by the
academic fraternity, the supposed “consciences and critics of society”, in texts and
journals of HRM.
One view, echoing Juliet’s famous statement that “that which we call a rose, by any
other name, would smell as sweet”, might be “what does it matter what we call it, as
long as we all know what we mean?” Such a view is naı̈ve, and ignores the huge and
increasingly recognised power of discourse to reflect and shape business and
organizational life (Grant et al., 2004).
A second view might recognize that a name sometimes live on institutionally, even
if it now has connotations far removed from its origins[1]. In the case of HR
management, presumably the label “personnel management” was not well entrenched
in formal structures or attributed much status, and the notion of “human resources”
with its link to the notion of top-level strategy making had overwhelming appeal. In
support of this, another view would be that the most important thing about a name is
accuracy of representation: if an organization adopts a thoroughgoing resource-based
approach as its basic strategic stance, then to call its HR function, say, “team member
relationships management” would be hypocritical. But I have anecdotal evidence that
some members of the HR profession themselves feel uncomfortable with the label, for
the reasons I have detailed in this article.
If HR management needs a new name, what should it be? Personally, I thought the
predecessor term “personnel management” was fine, but I recognize that nowadays it
may carry connotations of being a fringe, welfare-oriented, operational activity. Are humans
“Knowledge management” is possible, but the notion of “knowledge” is much wider resources?
than the knowledge embodied in employees, and in any case the term has been
appropriated by the IT fraternity (e.g. Rao, 2005). “Expertise management” would tie
the knowledge idea more closely to individuals’ skills, but paradoxically has a sterile,
non-human feel to it. The currently popular term “talent management” (Lewis and
Heckman, 2006) is better, particularly in its focus on higher-level workers; but articles 277
with this label tend to use it as a new bottle to serve the old HRM wine.
Going back to the idea of alternative metaphors for the workforce of an organization –
probably including the contractors as well as the employees – the concept of partnership
appeals. The employee or contractor is a partner of the organization assisting it to meet its
operational and strategic goals: conversely, the organization is a partner of employees
and contractors assisting them to meet their personal and career goals. The idea of
employees being partners with the organization rather than resources of it suggests,
perhaps, “human partnership management” (HPM – note that it is the partnership not the
partner that is managed). Another possibility, which places the term squarely in the
employment arena and separate from, for example, personal relationships or customer
relationships, is to use the term “employment partnership management”, or EPM. It is
true of course, that such a label also has the potential to be used quite cynically by
organizations to make relationships appear like partnerships which in actuality are much
more one-sided. On the other hand, such a formulation is, I suggest, more in keeping with
the continuing emancipation of workforces worldwide and the type of management
which increasing numbers of today’s organizations seek to practice.
Conclusion
I conclude, then, that the terms “human resource” and “human resource management”
and the way of thinking about people at work that they embody and encourage appear
to be increasingly dissonant with the new, non-hierarchical, network organizations and
knowledge-based workers with self-directed careers of the twenty-first century. The
result may be to encourage a depersonalized and dehumanized view of employment
relationships and a presumptuous attempt by management at appropriation of control
over individuals’ careers.
Because of the public imagery involved, this issue affects not just employers,
managers and employees, but the whole community. Mine is a very personal view of the
matter: as a lifelong academic I have always felt that one of the key benefits of academic
life was the fact that I have not been treated as a resource, but have been able to pursue my
work and career as I wished, in the knowledge that my employing universities would be
willing to work with me to find mutual benefit from my initiatives. It may be more difficult
in other industries. Debate on this topic is welcomed.
Note
1. An example is the fact that the key degree in applied business studies world wide is still the
Master of Business Administration (MBA). “Administration” was once upon a time a
welcome accolade, but who wants to be thought of as an “administrator” now? After the
second world war, “management” replaced “administration” in popularity, but in turn
acquired a similar reputation for being static and – well, administrative. But through it all,
the MBA lives on, name unchanged.
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Corresponding author
Kerr Inkson can be contacted at: kinkson@mngt.waikato.ac.nz
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The resource-based view of the firm

A view from career studies

organizational benefit as a result of learning. An organization that hires a new

1995, p. 310, italics added)

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1. David Starr-Glass. Teachable Moments in Human Resource Management: National Culture,

565-581. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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