Critically challenging some assumptions in HRD

Abstract

This paper sets out to critically challenge five inter-related assumptions prominent in the HRD literature. These relate to: the exploitation of labour in enhancing shareholder value; the view that employees are co-contributors to and co-recipients of HRD benefits; the distinction between HRD and HRM; the relationship between HRD and unitarism; and, the relationship between HRD and organisational and learning cultures. From a critical modernist perspective, it is argued that these can only be adequately addressed by taking a point of departure from the particular state of the capital-labour relation in time, place and space. HRD, of its nature, exists in a continuous state of dialectical tension between capital and labour—and there is much that critical scholarship has yet to do in informing practitioners about how they might manage and cope with such tension.