In Search of the Subject: Researching Employee Reactions to Human Resource Management

Abstract

Far too little is known about how employees, as the subject of Human Resource Management (HRM), react to its practice. Both the performance-focused and critical streams of writing on HRM perceive the employee in instrumental terms, while neither stream provides a satisfactory means of accommodating competing conceptions of HRM itself. An emerging stream of employee-focused literature makes a credible attempt to assess employee reactions but it too is affected by conceptual and methodological limitations. With a view to addressing these shortcomings, this article employs a discursive framework of analysis which distinguishes between concepts (HRM ideas), objects (idealised human resources) and subjects (thinking and acting employees on whom HRM is practised). It argues that a meaningful evaluation of the discursive concept of HRM only becomes possible by analysing the primary discursive object of HRM (the employee) as a discursive subject. Drawing on the most promising insights offered in the employee-focused literature, including the notions of the psychological contract and organisational justice, the article proposes a series of research questions designed to assist researchers to be more methodical and reflexive in their efforts to recentre the employee as the primary subject of HRM.