Stakeholder Analysis as a Tool for Systems Approach Research in HRD

The world is experiencing significant, largely economic and sociotechnical, induced change. These induced changes are meaningful with a function of people taking collective actions around common beliefs. These changes are more than jargon, cliché and hyperbole, and they are effecting major transformations. These transformations will impact on how human resources are developed and we need to be able to forecast its effects. In order to produce such forecasts, HRD needs to become more predictive - to develop the ability to understand how human capital systems and organizations will behave in future. Further development of systems models is required to allow such predictions to be made. Critical to the development of such models will be to understand that linear epistemology cannot be the dominant epistemology of practice and that dynamic complexity of challenges confronted by HRD professionals in their daily research and practice requires a nonlinear epistemology of practice, rather than reductive or linear thinking or processes of normal science. Although the adoption of a systems approach to research in HRD is not novel, methodologies and conceptual approaches underlying it use are not very well developed. In this paper, a stakeholder analysis methodology that was developed as a novel method in conducting systems approach research in human resource development, public policy and agricultural education is described.