Over the last few months, much of my time has been taken up by convening a module at the University of Kent. CB681: “Managing Human Resources in Contemporary Organizations” is in many respects a generalist course that seeks to introduce students to thinking about HRM in a very broad sense in order to lay the groundwork for a number of final year undergraduate modules as well as the Msc HRM which is taught by my department. It’s the first time that I was made fully and solely responsible for a course. While I greatly enjoyed the experience of the course there are a few things that I continue to reflect upon while I wait for the final exam scripts to come in. I’ve decided to pen them here in the hopes that I might develop them into a more substantive paper at some point. I use the second person as a way of addressing the text to a reader (perhaps my future self) who does not quite remember what it’s like to convene a module as an early-career researcher, still technically in the limbo between PhD and a permanent lectureship.

Compassion

Most research currently indicates that both students and staff in the contemporary university are increasingly suffering with various forms of mental illness (depression, anxiety disorders, chronic stress, workaholism, burnout etc.). Whether this is because we are better at spotting the signs of mental illness, more willing to pathologize the highs and lows that constitute human life, less able to cope with highs and lows because of the various currents of modernity or because something about our current socio-historical moment (precarious work, debt, normalized intensity of work etc.) which produces the symptoms of mental illness, is a consideration beyond you. Regardless, you find yourself often confronted with students who are struggling to manage, to continue to live and do the basic tasks of studying at a university. Students missing presentations, lectures and seminars because of their struggles with depression or anxiety has become a common part of your job.

You find yourself reflecting on the word “compassion”; not just a form of empathy or sympathy, compassion literally means “to suffer with”. While your are sensitive to the idea of co-opting someone else’s struggles and are aware that you can’t feel their sorrows for them, you do feel a profound sense of misery over the plights of your students and often find yourself in situations where you think that you are more sensitive to the ways in which academic action (through setting tests/creating a culture of continuous assessment, ambiguity in the teaching method etc.) can often be complicit in heightening stress and anxiety in the student body. Perhaps you are simply younger and less jaded than your colleagues and soon enough the crushing reality of the UK Higher Education system will strip you of this. Perhaps, your position within CMS and engagement with critiques of neoliberalism have made it so that you are more aware of the sundry effects of late-capitalism. Perhaps what is needed is not prescription and pathology but an existential education, one which, to borrow from Robert Solomon’s excellent introduction to the subject, can cultivate:

“an attitude that recognizes the unresolvable confusion of the human world, yet resists the all-too-human temptation to resolve the confusion by grasping toward whatever appears or can be made to appear firm or familiar […] the existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing  a confused world that he cannot accept” (Solomon, 1987: 238)

You start thinking about ways to worm an existential agenda into your teaching/discussions with students, while staying on the right side of expectations in terms of the correct conduct of a lecturer and with deference to the practice of referring students to university support services.

Capitulation

The first examination that you sat at university was for a course called “People and Organizations” taught by John Hassard. It’s format was simple enough: answer two essay questions in two hours. It was the kind of thing that you’d done before at A-Levels. However, because you’d never lived in a temperate climate before, you didn’t really understand being cold. You walked the 15 minutes from your apartment to the exam hall in the middle of January in nothing more than a T-shirt and a thin hoodie. You were perhaps an hour early and would be shivering by the time they let you into an unheated exam hall to sit the test. Even though you attended every lecture, and understood the material (indeed, four years later you would find yourself guest lecturing on that course), panic exacerbated by the cold rendered you largely unable to produce even one coherent essay. You received a 43 for the module- the lowest grade that you’d receive during your entire tenure in higher education.

Even now, this mortifying experience remains in the back of your mind. You oppose tests for a number of reasons, and will openly say that they are pedagogically bankrupt. They create unnecessary stress for the students because of the spectre of the unknown that accompanies them; they are tests of recall and memory rather than tests of understanding, research and reasoning. They offer limited opportunities for skills development/feedback because essay papers are seldom returned. Most importantly, they are unsuited to your pedagogical style which always emphasizes critical thinking rather than memorization. You often say to students: “I don’t care if you remember what I say, I want to see that you can think like I do about organizations”. For these reasons you prefer essays to exams, finding them to be better opportunities for the demonstration of the kinds of skills that you care to examine.

When you begin your new job, you inherit a course that uses not one but two examinations as modes of assessment. Finding this to be highly problematic you go to your Head of Department and ask how you would go about changing these to something more suitable. You are cordially informed that because you are only taking the course temporarily and because of the time of the year, you would not be able to change the mode of assessment. Rather than protesting and standing by your principles, you capitulate and do as you’re told. While you rationalize that you don’t have the institutional power to refuse to participate in a system of assessment which you do not agree with, when you find yourself having to put students through an exam you will feel guilty about not having done more to stand by what you believed. As you invigilate the first of the tests, you want a student’s leg jittering nervously and remember being in the January cold.

Complicity

i.

At some point during your PhD, you notice the emergence of a perverse new language throughout the Business School. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be speaking about “transferrable skills development” and “employability”. You would hear colleagues berating students with sentences that began “when you go into the world of work…” as a way of making them do what they’re supposed to. When you first hear it you find it repellant. It seemed abhorrent to you that supposedly critical scholars could be so casually complicit in the neoliberal discourses that they should seek to critique of undermine. You remember a passage from a paper by Thompson and Cook:

“Disciplinary institutions such as schools, which have traditionally functioned as places of enclosure, affecting normalisation as individualisation and marked surfaces (bodies, classrooms, knowledges), are adopting corporate and free-market ideology.”

There are no ends to the colonizing logic of capitalism, everything must be rendered as a commodity- labour, ideas, behaviours, resistance- a perpetual and eternal obsession over the purchase encounter.

Two months into convening you first module, you use exactly this rhetoric of “When you go into the world of work…” to chide students for complaining about a 0900 seminar because you were distracted and couldn’t think of anything else to say at the time. Later that week, you use the phrase, “this is something that employers are looking for…” to convince a reluctant student that it’s important to develop their critical thinking skills. It is only when leaving both classrooms that you realize what you said. You feel a curious contempt for yourself both times. The truly insidious nature of “business bullshit” is how easy it is to reproduce it.

ii.

“This is the most interesting module I’ve taken at university and I wanted to speak to you about pursuing a career in HRM” they say. Somehow a student has conflated your promptings to consider the moral, social and ecological sustainability of the dominant paradigms of HRM to be an indication that this is what HRM practice is like. It is clear from conversation with them that they believe HRM to be an organizational arm of “social justice” or ethical concern. You don’t know how to tell them that the appeal of this course is very different from the appeal of a well-paying job in Human Resources where one’s actions can be dressed up in the rhetoric of “helping people do their best”. You panic while sitting in your own office because you aren’t sure how to describe to this student that the reason that you were so insistent upon weekly “critical considerations” of HRM’s role in the modern corporation was precisely because it is so often complicit in underpaying workers, ignoring realities of stress and overwork, perpetuating the gender pay gap and other forms of discrimination, outsourcing to find cheaper solutions, layoffs as organizational strategy, suppressing unions, and controlling rather than empowering employee voice etc. etc.. You decide to say nothing and hope that your provocations can lead to this student being some kind of agent of change in whatever workplace they end up in and not either a victim or another stooge (you are not sure which would be worse) in what Thompson called “disconnected capitalism”. You are, however, too cynical to be so hopeful.

Critique

Critical Management Studies is arguably a part of the “mainstream” of HRM. Given how difficult it has proven for you to find a job and explain to interview panels what CMS is and why it matters, you are very surprised to see critical scholars and their perspectives in mainstream textbooks like Bratton and Gold (2017). Tony Watson’s work is discussed, as it Delbridge and Keenoy’s interest in critical HRM; mentions of Barbara Townley and Karen Legge are everywhere and the more critical aspects of David Guest’s project make an appearance. Perhaps Bratton and Gold are more to the left than you think. Perhaps you simply expected to find no critique and are overestimating the ubiquity of what little you seen. Perhaps you are simply unfamiliar with the intellectual territory but you have yet to see a discussion of supply-side economics or a course on “transformational leadership” be punctuated with a discussion of the exploitation of precarious workers or the identity politics of leadership; CMS does not appear to be as take up elsewhere.

While this might encouragingly mean that the conversation around HRM is becoming more socially progressive  (in one sense perhaps the discipline’s “Overton window” is shifting Left), you still find this troubling because of the ways in which HRM conceptualizes itself as a pro-business function in the organization; never truly an advocate for worker interests. You worry that, rather than subverting this pro-business, “profit-at-any-costs” agenda, you are complicit in a system that teaches the language of critical thinking, to be deployed by students who will go on to work in the contemporary corporation and use that same language to better exploit and manipulate workers. You remember Kane Faucher’s paper McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? and reflect on the inevitability of attempts at critique or resistance being co-opted in order to further profit maximization.

While you find a certain joy in the legitimacy of recommending critical readings out of the course textbook, you continue to be concerned rather than hopeful about the consequences.