The Danger of Potentiality: Who Speaks HRM?

Seminar with Bogdan Costea, University of Lancaster

This seminar examines one of the salient features of HRM over the last years: the constant preoccupation with the theme of potentiality as that which is to be mobilised in its twofold aim of self-realisation (the actualisation of everything that ‘I’ could be), and of productivity and performativity (as personal potential is increasingly realised, the efficacy, the results of ‘my’ work, will also always increase).  The danger signalled in the title lies precisely in the ground from which HRM now speaks: through an alleged emancipatory, liberating, language about work as self-realisation, it may perhaps have come to occupy a position from which it is extremely hard to shake up, to push back.  Because there is probably no such ‘back’ to push it into: successive decades of sustained social and cultural destructuring of trade unions, concomitant with the sustained cultural growth of HRM on the terrain of positivity, have left very little of the pre-HRM sense of our relationship to work standing.  The theme of potentiality is thus raised not simply as a fragment of HRM, but as one of its constituent parts that allows us to understand better the whole, namely: (a) how HRM in general configures the subject it addresses; and (b) what dangers lie in its language of positivity if we are to think of HRM as an overextended, untenable promise.

Bogdan Costea joined the department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster in 1998, after working for four years in the Management Development Division of LUMS.  He has an MA from Bucharest, Romania, and a PhD from Lancaster.  He pursues three main lines of investigation and analysis: subjectivity, work and managerialism in the context of modernity.  These three areas of concern are underlaid by a common thread that directly yet ambiguously connects the growth and empowerment of Human Resources Management during the past quarter-century with wider developments in the social sciences, philosophy and the humanities.