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

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