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Page 1: HRD Attitudes: Or the Roles and Ethical Stances of Human Resource Developers

This article was downloaded by: [University of Calgary]On: 05 May 2013, At: 15:29Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Human Resource DevelopmentInternationalPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhrd20

HRD Attitudes: Or the Roles and EthicalStances of Human Resource DevelopersColin Fisher Dra Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, UKb Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent University,Burton Street, Nottingham, NG1 4BU, UK E-mail:Published online: 17 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Colin Fisher Dr (2005): HRD Attitudes: Or the Roles and Ethical Stances ofHuman Resource Developers, Human Resource Development International, 8:2, 239-255

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Page 2: HRD Attitudes: Or the Roles and Ethical Stances of Human Resource Developers

HRD Attitudes: Or the Roles and EthicalStances of Human Resource Developers

COLIN FISHERNottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, UK

ABSTRACT The paper challenges the assumption that HRD practice is necessarily good or benign.It recognizes that HRD involves moral choices and provides a conceptual exploration of thematter, enlivened by anecdotal illustration. The semiotic square is the chosen tool for the task. Ithas been built around a descriptive matrix of HRD roles and four ethical stances. All the roleshave been argued to possess potential ethical limitations and the conclusion is reached that HRDpractice is not ethically uniform and is not necessarily an unambiguously good thing. However,the main benefit of the semiotic square analysis is that it enables the ethical limitations of HRD tobe described and mapped.

KEY WORDS: Human resource development, ethics, semiotic square

Introduction

Human resource development (HRD) may be seen as one of the more moralmanagement functions. It is intended to help people learn and develop, which mustbe seen as a good thing. Hatcher (2002) has expanded this belief into an argumentthat HRD departments have a leadership role in transforming their organizationsinto good corporate citizens. The comfortable assumption about the intrinsicgoodness of HRD has been identified and challenged by Woodall and Douglas(1999, p. 259, 2000, p. 116). They initiated an ethical critique of HRD practices thatare designed to manipulate people to adopt behaviours and values that are beneficialto their employers. Their papers are part of a debate in which some have advocatedincreasing the professionalism of HRD practitioners, by developing codes of ethicalconduct, as a response to the ethical problems faced by the profession(Bergenhenegouwen, 1996; Burns et al., 2001; Ruona, 2000; Russ-Eft, 2004). Thereis a recognition in this debate (Russ-Eft and Hatcher, 2003, p. 304) that an analyticaleffort is necessary to model and theorize the HRD practitioners’ ethical decisionmaking, as well to define the standards they should work by. The intention of thispaper is to move the debate about the ethics of HRD away from the aspirational(how should HRD practitioners behave?) and towards the analytical (what ethicaldifficulties face HRD practitioners and how do they respond to them?)

Correspondence Address: Dr Colin Fisher, Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent

University, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU, UK. Email: [email protected]

Human Resource Development International,Vol. 8, No. 2, 239 – 255, June 2005

ISSN 1367-8868 Print/1469-8374 Online/05/020239-17 ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/13678860500100616

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The paper is entirely theoretical but its frameworks may prove a precursor toempirical work. A two-stage conceptual framework is proposed. The first stage mapsthe roles HRD practitioners may take. There is a well-established literature on roleswithin HRD. McLagan and Suhadolnik (1989) identified fifteen functional roles(such as marketer, change agent, and evaluator) that related to the contributionpeople made to HRD objectives. Gilley and Eggland (1989) simplified these roles tofour, the manager, the learning specialist, the instructional designer, and theconsultant. Although these writers are alert to ethical matters, they define the rolesfunctionally. In the first part of this paper HRD roles are reconsidered from anethical perspective by defining them in relation to an epistemology of values, bywhich is meant the differing degrees of wholeness or fragmentation that peopleattribute to their ethical values and to those of the wider world.

Stewart (2003) has argued that HRD is unalterably ethical because it requiresmoral choices to be made. These choices, he argues, are complex, which implies thatthey may involve sacrificing some ethical ends in order to achieve others. Theexistence of such compromises is recognized in the introduction to the Academy ofHuman Resource Development’s Standards on Ethics and Integrity.

Making ethical decisions can be difficult because long-range social responsibilityconsiderations may conflict with immediate needs. Or, ethical principles may seemeven to be in conflict with one another. Finally, at times we are forced to chooseamong bad options.

(Academy of Human Resource Development, 1999, p. 1)

In the second stage of the analysis these ethical trade-offs will be identified, andassociated with particular HRD roles, by using a semiotic square analysis. It will beargued that the necessity for such ethical trade-offs does not arise simply from thecircumstances of the situation but also from the different roles’ understandings of theplace of values and ethics, which was referred to earlier as the epistemology ofvalues.

The Dimensions

A range of roles in HRD will be defined, in a conceptual framework (Figure 1),against two dimensions of the epistemology of values, which both relate to the ideaof ethical wholeness or fragmentation. The first dimension concerns the extent towhich a person believes their own ethical values to be a unified whole or, to a greateror lesser degree, a variable set. The second dimension concerns a person’s beliefsabout the holistic or fragmentary nature of the wider cultural field in which they liveand work.

The first dimension has three positions on it: principle, policy, and aporia. Thefirst two terms are taken from the jurist Dworkin’s work on rights. Principle isdefined as ‘a standard that is to be observed, not because it will advance aneconomic, political or social situation, but because it is a requirement of fairness orjustice or some other dimension of morality’ (Dworkin, 1977, p. 22).

Policy, in contrast, is an approach that ‘sets out a goal to be reached, generally animprovement in some economic, political or social feature’ (Dworkin 1977: 22).

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It follows that a person’s principles are more likely to be integrated over time,because they are based on fixed belief, whereas policy is a response to circumstancesand so may change and become fragmentary over time.

The third possible position on the dimension is aporia: the state which exhibits ahigh degree of fragmentation of personal values. It means being uncertain because ofthe variety of competing values or demands. In rhetoric aporia is a figure of speech inwhich, according to an illustrative quote from a work of 1657 provided by theOxford English Dictionary: ‘the speaker sheweth that he doubteth either where tobegin for the Multitude of Matters, or what to do or say in some strange orambiguous thing’. In the conceptual framework aporia therefore means a position ofmoral uncertainty or confusion, either genuine or feigned. Aporia has a moremodern usage in deconstructionist thought that reinforces this meaning. In thiscontext it is the final impasse, arrived at when interpreting a text, caused by the textundermining its own presuppositions. Such paradoxes are the basis of thedeconstructionists’ claim that the meaning of texts is indeterminate.

The second dimension has four positions on it – modernism, neo-traditionalism,traditionalism, and postmodernism. These are common categories in a range ofcultural studies as diverse as architecture and political science. Their use in this paperhowever is developed from the work of Friedman (1994, pp. 91 – 3). He uses aslightly different terminology, introducing the term primitivism and conflatingtraditionalism and neo-traditionalism. What has been taken from Friedman is hisdifferentiation of the categories according to whether they represent communalhomogeneity (primitivism and traditionalism) or fragmented individualism (moder-nity and postmodernity). This distinction between understanding the ethical andcultural world as unified or fragmented will be used to define the four positions. A

Figure 1. Defining the HRD roles

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traditionalist sees a unified world united by time-hallowed values. The other threepositions see the ethical world as fragmented but have different responses to thisperception. The modernist believes that unity can be constructed by the rationaldevelopment of individuals. The neo-traditionalist believes unity can be restoredonly by a return to neglected traditional values. The postmodernist accepts theinevitability of fragmentation and enjoys it.

The four categories are often represented as a historical series – traditionalism,modernism, neo-traditionalism, andpostmodernism.This schemaparallels in part thatof Pedlar et al. (1996) who developed a chronological sequence in the development oftraining and development. They defined four HRDdecades, beginning with the periodbefore 1965, which exhibited a pre-scientific (traditional) approach to training, andending with holistic approaches in the decade up to 1995 (which has many neo-traditionalist elements). However, in this analysis the four positions are not a historicalprogression but positions or strategies that people may adopt. As Friedman (1994: 93)pointed out, someone can be modernist about education but traditionalist in regard totheir teenage children. The four positions will be discussed in turn.

Modernism

Modernism is the first position on the vertical scale in Figure 1. Progress, both moraland technical, is thought possible through individual effort and rationality:‘[modernist identity] is epitomized by the notion of the self-developing individual,rootless yet constantly evolving to new heights’ (Friedman, 1994, p. 39). Itnecessarily involves a belief that some things can be objectively defined as better thanothers and that progress towards the good things is possible. People thinking in amodernist mode can accept that the world may be fragmented, transient, and fleetingbut see this as merely a stage that can be transcended by human reason and intention(Harvey, 1989, p. 15). However, in some forms of modernity the unity sought is thehegemony of commercial relationships. In the HRD field modernity can imply theuse of rational, analytical, and systematic development methods directed to meetingthe purposes of an organization. The edifices of competence frameworks and missionstatements, which seek to reduce the complexity of organizational work tocontrollable hierarchies of objectives, units, elements, and criteria, represent theambition, and the hubris, of the modernist project.

There is another version of modernism that sees the form just discussed asblinkered. This has been called emancipatory modernism (Legge, 1995, p. 288) and ittakes a view beyond the purposes of organizations and asks what makes an equitableand fair society. It tries to blow away the fog that prevents people from seeing theinjustices caused by the quotidian ethical adjustments made by employees andorganizations in global and competitive markets.

Neo-traditionalism

Neo-traditionalism is a view that rejects modernism and seeks an organic form ofexistence. In terms of HRD it aspires to return to the importance of values andcommunity that presumably existed before modernist rationality drove out customaryverities. This view has two major expressions in HRD. The first is a form of ‘back to

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basics’ and traditional values. Historically this may be dated to the publication ofPeters and Waterman’s (1982) In Search of Excellence that advocated replacing the‘paralysis by analysis’ of modernism with an emphasis on values and organizationalculture. The second expression is the wave of interest in ‘New Age’ therapies andphilosophies that encourage the spiritual growth of individuals through the rejection ofmaterialism. It might be thought that this would fit ill with the self-interest oforganizations but Covey’s work (1992) has led to many HRD practitioners believingthat concerns for individual growth and organizational growth can be combined.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is founded on an enclosed world of unified values and customs.Traditional values are immutable, not affected by changes in fashion and technologybecause the traditional view of time is circular rather then linear. Things may changebut only because they are returning to where they were before. Tradition not onlyencloses time it also constrains space. The implications of tradition for HRD practiceare that it will take place within the confines of a locality, such as a particular factoryor office block, and will be based upon the methods the practitioners learnt early intheir careers.

Postmodernism

It is rash to explain postmodernism in a paragraph, but no wiser to explain it atlength. Postmodernism rejects the neo-traditional belief in shared values. It is a wayof thinking that views the world as a confused and ambiguous place. Language isseen as incapable of conveying true meaning, values cannot be placed in a hierarchyof truth and actions contradict themselves. Postmodernism does not try to transcendor overcome this confusion, instead it ‘swims and even wallows in the fragmentaryand chaotic currents of change as if that was all there is’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 45).Playfulness is a form of wallowing and this is how HRD practitioners in thecondition of postmodernity might be expected to behave. One form of playfulness isthe bricolage that can be seen in the jumbling up of ideas from diverse sources indevelopment programmes designed in postmodern mode. Postmodern approaches toHRD celebrate flexibility and ambiguity and reflect the shift from jobs standardizedby job description and grade to ones that are flexible, multi-skilled, and evolving(Legge, 1995, p. 301).

The Roles of HRD Practitioners

The two dimensions can be used to identify twelve HRD practitioner roles, as shownin Figure 1, according to each role’s beliefs about the holism or fragmentation ofethics and values. The roles are named and described in Table 1. They could be used,encouraged by the caricaturing tone of some of the sketches in which they aredescribed, to label and stereotype others. Although such a use might be tempting itwould be dangerous. The roles are not descriptions of fixed positions that peopleoccupy. They are accounts of HRD practices that people may adopt and abandonaccording to preference and circumstances. The use of labels to characterize the roles

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Table 1. Tentative descriptions of the HRD roles and stances

Brief description of the roles

Modernist Radical critiquers have firm principles and they value their use ofrationality to challenge aspects of the organizations they work within.They adopt an emancipatory form of modernism and see themselves asdevil’s advocates. Such challenges will cause people in the organization torethink and help create a better organization. The systems designers alsovalue their rational capabilities to change the external world but, becausethey are less driven by personal convictions and more by the desire to meetthe organization’s goals, they adopt an instrumentally modernistapproach. HRD practitioners taking this stance emphasize thedevelopment of techniques (competency frameworks, psychometrictesting, 3608 appraisal) to maximize the chances that employees willdeliver the organization’s objectives. The cynical role is often taken bythose who are disappointed by the failure of HRD to deliver on itspromises. They have lost faith but still have to do their jobs.

Neo-traditionalist HRD gurus are concerned with developing people. As they have fixedideas about how this should be achieved they require disciples who will‘buy into’ their particular values and principles. Gurus offer a package, acommodified route to development. The role seems particularly attractedto fads and fashion. Culture designers have similar aims but seek to changethe organization’s culture to the organization’s ends. They seek to create aculture in which people choose to take self-responsibility for developingthemselves in ways that will advantage both themselves and theiremployers. They provide the seminars and learning resources that willenable employees to become competent. They favour one-day seminarsand slick development methods with high production values. Counsellorsdo not have the gurus’ preferred solutions or the culture designers’concern with the corporate. They are subjectivists who seek to understandthe individuals’ own values and concerns and help them identify their ownsolutions. Labelling counsellors aporetic might be unfair because theymay have firm views on the appropriate therapeutic frameworks eventhough they are non-judgmental towards clients.

Traditionalist The mentor role assumes that there is a body of customary or tacitknowledge that is best acquired by an apprenticeship spent at the feet of amaster. The terms apprentice and master sound mediaeval but mentoring,which Armstrong (1998: 178 – 9) defined as learning by watching andinteracting with an experienced senior employee, is a modern process thatshares these terms’ values. Hagiographies of successful entrepreneursprovide a vicarious form of mentoring for those who cannot gain directaccess to good role models. Mentoring assumes there are traditional ideasand practices, essential to success, that do not change. So ancient writersof aphorisms can be used to provide a rich source of wisdom for modernmanagers. Two such sages used by modern writers are Lao-Tzu who wrotein China in the third century BCE (Herman, 1994) and Kautilya, an Indianwriter of (probably) the fourth century BCE (Kumar and Rao, 1996; Starzland Dhir, 1986). The training officer role is focused on equipping people todo their jobs well. Training is seen as necessary but ancillary to the centraloperations of an organization. The role might well involve a systematicapproach through the use of training needs analysis but it could also takean even more traditional form in which training issues are dealt with in anad hoc way. Ritualists are like priests who no longer believe in God but

(continued)

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carries another danger. Terms such as counsellor and mentor have multiple, and notnecessarily consistent, meanings. On some definitions the terms I have used may notfit the description of the role. The benefit of a catchy label is at the price of a loss ofsubtlety. Consequently the roles must be considered as provisional and subject todebate.

Table 1. (continued)

Brief description of the roles

who still find the liturgy comforting. They value the processes of HRDwhile having doubts about their point. Just as myths can help societiescome to terms with the paradoxes and injustices of their condition (Kirk,1976: 83) so can the routines and symbols of day-to-day HRD work helppractitioners deal with the tensions in their working lives. Those whoadopt this stance will resist major changes in HRD practices, such as theuse of the Internet, which would remove the comfort of repetition.

Postmodernist Intellectuals’ postmodern perspective leads them to emphasize theireclectic abilities as a bulwark against the ineluctability of the world, whichno amount of capability can overcome. As HRD practitioners they delightin playing with ideas. Pragmatists try to link the intellectuals’postmodernism with attempts to improve the world. This requires adialogue between different people’s beliefs. Such conversation will notbring us to an ultimate truth. However, if the conversations were to stopthen there would be no checks on the bad things that might be done(Mounce, 1997: 185 – 9). The pragmatist HRD practitioner works withinthe paradox – that you have to keep on trying to develop practice eventhough it is known that there will be no authoritative or definitiveresolution. Although they understand the complexity and fragmentationof the world they do not sink into cynicism. In order to maintaincommitment when there are no fixed purposes, according to Rorty:what is needed is a sort of intellectual analogue of civic virtue – tolerance,irony and a willingness to let spheres of culture to flourish withoutworrying too much about their ‘common ground’, their unification, the‘intrinsic ideas’ they suggest or what picture of man they presuppose.(Rorty, 1985: 168)An HRD person in this role accepts diverse approaches to developmentwhile ignoring the blandishments of those who argue that the adoption ofthe latest HRD fad will solve all the organization’s problems. They valuethe dialogue between people and beliefs that HRD generates, whileexpecting no consensus to emerge. Language is used to create movement,while recognizing that the words used have only a temporary validity.Wyver expressed this ability to both mean and to challenge the meaning ofwords simultaneously. ‘Indeed if it didn’t sound hopelessly sentimental,I’d say that my only support for the idea is some kind of faith (but thenthat is a word banished from the postmodern vocabulary) in theindividual (and that’s certainly another)’ (Wyver, 1989). The game playerrole is the nearest to what might be called hard postmodernism. It issimilar to the ritualist position, but in this case even the ritualist’s comfortin routines and symbols has gone. ‘Incredulity towards metanarratives’, touse Lyotard’s (1988: 46) famous phrase, and the incommensurability ofvalues lead to a sense of purposelessness. All that remains is to play thegame.

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The Ethical Problems Associated with the Roles

The argument that will be presented is that the HRD roles cannot be divided intogood and bad but that all the roles have potential ethical limitations, albeit ofdifferent kinds. The semiotic square will be used to explore these ethical limitations.

The Semiotic Square

The semiotic square was developed from the classical and scholastic logicians’ squareof opposition (Parsons, 1999) by Greimas (1987), and has been popularized in theUK by Chandler (2001) as a tool for analysing connections and relationships withina text. In this paper it is used to analyse roles rather than texts. All semiotic squareanalyses begin with a key theme and continue by plotting three types of relationshipsthat necessarily stem from it. I will illustrate with an analysis of the notion of goodshown in Figure 2.

The first type of relationship is opposition or contrariety. If we begin with good itsopposite is bad. Each of these two terms then has its contradiction – the second form ofrelationship. In the semiotic square opposites and contradictions are not the same.Contradiction occurs when particulars and practicalities negate formal, universalterms. An example is the poet Edna St. VincentMillay’s remark ‘I love humanity but Ihate people’. If the good is negated we are left with an absence of good, which is not thesame as the bad; it may be mere indifference. Indifference however, in its connectionwith ‘bad’, represents the third kind of relationship – complementarity – because, as inthe quotation famously (but probably incorrectly) attributed to Edmund Burke, ‘theonly thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for goodmen to do nothing’. Indifferencemay permit badness but is not thewhole of it. It is, to use the term of the original squareof opposition, subaltern to it. The most complex relationship is now left, which is thecontradiction of bad, the negation of the negation. If we absent the bad, we are left with

Figure 2. The semiotic square applied to the idea of ‘good’

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benignity (as incorporated in the ancient precept, first of all do no harm). This is theopposite of indifference. Benignity allows the good to occur and avoids the bad, but onits own does not constitute the good. Benignity may consist only in avoiding the doingof harm and not concern itself with doing good. The semiotic square, as in the examplejust given, identifies four terms which stand in a formal, logical relationship one withanother. It is worth repeating that this example is solely to help explain the semioticsquare and is not part of the analysis of HRD roles.

The semiotic square will be used to analyse the roles defined in Figure 1. Theanalysis shown in Figure 3 expands Figure 1 by adding new elements – the stances ofthe prophet, the subjectivist, the quietist, and the rhetorician – at the four corners.They represent four approaches to the ethical aspects of HRD practitioners’ roles.(Ethical in this context means ‘pertaining to morality and the science of ethics’ and isnot a synonym of ‘good’.) The stances relate to each other in the semiotic squarethrough contradiction, contrariness, or complementarity.

The ethical characteristics of the four stances will now be discussed. The degree towhich the twelve roles reflect the four stances is in proportion to their distance fromeach stance in the matrix of Figure 3. Not all the twelve roles will be discussed indetail, for reasons of space, although certain ones will be highlighted to illustrateparticular points about the ethical stances.

The Ethical Limitations of Prophets

The role of prophet has been placed at the starting point for the semiotic squareanalysis. Prophets want to act on the world, or at least their organizations, withoutthe constraint of comment or caution from others. Their monocular ethical visionmeans they may do great harm if their vision happens to be wrong or bad. The top

Figure 3. The HRD ethical stances analysed as a semiotic square

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leadership of Enron, for example, developed a creative approach to accountancy thatbrooked no challenge but which led to bad accountancy and bankruptcy. Its leaderswere thought charismatic and this, together with the lavish lifestyle given to thoseemployees who survived their appraisals, protected them from challenge (Moon,2003). Not paying attention to questioning voices was seen as a small price to pay forshare price growth.

Gurus are positive prophets who have a prescription for how things should bechanged and people developed. They require disciples who will ‘buy into’ theparticular values and principles they offer. Gurus present a package, acommodified route to development. The stance seems particularly attracted tofads and fashion. Feng Shui has provided the latest source from which gurus canextract managerial wisdom. The ‘Beyond Strategy’ organization, for example, thatworks in the Internet business has based its logo and its organizational philosophyon Feng Shui principles (Beyond Strategy, 2001). Neuro-linguistic programming(NLP), which is a method of improving competency at communication (Lyon,1996), may be another such package. The way in which NLP has beentrademarked and packaged makes it an example of the ethical concerns(Hardiman, 1994) associated with the prophets’ stance towards HRD. The gururole poses an ethical threat because it seeks to replace moral agency with pre-packaged prescriptions for behaviour.

Radical critiquers are an example of prophets who wish to change the world, ororganizations, but may not have a clear idea of how. They are driven by disapprovalof what is rather than a vision of what might be. Parker (1998, p. 35), for example,produced a critique of business ethics that argued that the concept could lead to aworsening of, and not an improvement in, organizational behaviour. It was sufficientfor the writer as a critiquer to have identified the paradoxes within the concept.

The problem I find it difficult to address in the rest of the paper will be whatoptions are left for a project like ‘Business Ethics’ if all the above [paradoxes] areaccepted. It would simply be inappropriate for me to tie up a paper like this at theend as if I really did have a magical solution to these problems.

(Parker, 1998, p. 35)

Radical critiquers’ disapproval may have many sources including anti-globaliza-tion, feminism, and sustainability. It is arguable that such challenging oforganizational values is good for organizations. The ethical danger is that suchdevil’s advocacy can become unchallenged zealotry. Examples of this phenomenonare highly contested, but satanic ritual abuse (SRA) may be one example. Showalter(1997: ch. 12) argued that some psychiatrists and social workers used the concept ofSRA, the widespread existence of which she questioned, as a means of radicallycritiquing society. Through events on the ‘SRA conference circuit’ professionals andpatients ‘learn to tell their stories’ (Showalter, 1997, p. 180). Some workers in theearly 1990s acted on this new understanding and children were taken into carebecause of allegations of SRA. In two high-profile cases subsequent investigationfound no evidence to support the claims of ritual abuse and the social workersinvolved were criticized (Showalter, 1997, p. 172). Although such instances are rarethey do show the ethical pitfalls the radical critique role may fall into.

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The ethical danger posed by prophets is that they are closed to the challenges anddialogue that can test whether their criticisms, nostrums, or systems are good.

The Ethical Limitations of Subjectivists

Subjectivists are doubters. They are the opposite of the prophets who doubt little.Their persistent probing, sarcastically in the case of the cynics, is the negation ofquietism but it complements the rhetoricians’ need for constant debate.Questioning the way things are done shows engagement with the world, but it isbeset with anxieties as the grounds of their questioning constantly shift. This is theSartrean position that recognizes that individuals make themselves through theirown choices but also that people ‘cannot transcend human subjectivity’. By thisSartre (1957, p. 14) meant that when we make a choice for ourselves we also,because we would never make an evil choice, make an implicit choice about howwe believe all others should be. The ethical limitation of the subjectivists is thatthey believe that everyone must make their own choices while recognizing thatindividuals’ own choices implicitly impose expectations on others. They suffer aninstability caused by the collective implications of their individualism. Schwartz(1998) argued that this is the explanation of Peter Drucker’s rejection of theconcept of business ethics. Drucker takes the view that ethical responsibility lieswith individuals. It cannot rest with collectives such as organizations and thereforecodes of business ethics are pointless because they detract from individuals’accountability. However, individual responsibility can be discharged and testedonly through dialogue within an organization or a community. The constant tug ofindividual expression against collective or communal action leads to ethicalfragmentation or a distortion of ethical dialogue.

An example of this tension within HRD might be Western trainers’ uncertaintyabout imposing their philosophy of learning in programmes delivered in post-Sovietcountries that are designed to prepare managers (accustomed to the communistsystem) to operate within a free market economy. Hollinshead and Michailova(2001), for example, report how Western trainers’ commitment to experientiallearning waned when working with managers in Bulgaria and how they adapted theirteaching techniques to local expectations.

The cynic is the epitome of the subjectivists who fail to cope with this existentialangst. As Chaudhuri pointed out, ‘cynicism tries to compensate for the loss of moralcourage by airing malice’ (1987, p. 128). Team or cascade briefings sometimesillustrate this effect. Marchington et al. discovered that managers who delivered suchbriefings could be sceptical, apathetic, and casual towards the process.

The briefers. . .often made comments on the core [messages from the topmanagement] which succeeded in diminishing its impact on the audience, eitherby using a poor example to convey a general message or by querying the basis onwhich the message was built.

(Marchington et al., 1989, pp. 26, 28)

Gamble and Kelliher (1999, p. 275) reported that briefings were oftenunsuccessful; briefers saw the sessions as ‘ends in themselves as opposed to a means

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to an end’ and such cynicism may have contributed to their reported poor, or evennegative, impact on the listeners.

The counselling role illustrates subjectivism by its acceptance of gnosis. In classicalGreek gnosis is a form of knowledge that is distinct from rational and instrumentalknowledge such as knowing how to use project management software. Gnosis isknowledge obtained by an intuitive process of knowing oneself (Pagels, 1979, p. 18).Clark and Fraser identified counsellors’ connection with the idea of gnosis bydiscussing the Gestalt approach to HRD: ‘The Gestalt approach is not a set oftechniques or formulae for discovering self or others: it is an orientation to experiencewhich is dynamic and flexible in which the individual is open to all possibilities’(quoted in Woodall and Douglas, 1999, p. 259). Gestalt approaches involveunderstanding the relations between parts and wholes and so exemplify the tensionbetween the individual and others that is at the centre of the subjectivists’ stance.

The Ethical Limitations of Rhetoricians

Rhetoricians’ enjoyment of debates contradicts the prophets’ intolerance of dissent.Their role is subaltern to that of the subjectivists because it provides the context ofargument that allows the subjectivists to make their choices.

In appropriating the term rhetoric I am aware that it ought not to be seenpejoratively (Watson, 1994, p. 183), but as a common, unavoidable human skill.Games players, however, have allowed their skill at argument to become separatedfrom their own convictions. The point for them is not to be right but to win. Theycreate facades much as postmodern architects disguise industrial sheds behind jokeyelevations when building factories or supermarkets. The facades that HRDpractitioners build are the evaluation studies and annual reports that provide the‘bums on seats’ and ‘happy sheet’ statistics that are required to keep topmanagement content. In their professional magazines HRD practitioners aresometimes exhorted to ‘toot your own horn. All the bottom line data in the worldare worthless unless you can use them to market and promote HRD’s services to theorganisation’ (Lookatch, 1991). Such performance indicators may be provided bypractitioners despite their doubts about their worth. Leigh (1998) implies this is thecase with the ‘happy sheet’ comments (‘The workshop gave me the confidence tomanage my project’) that are used to promote the ‘sell ‘em cheap, pack ‘em in’ one-day management seminars that are commonly available in the HRD marketplace.Desmond (1998, pp. 173 – 4) described the practices that created a sense of moralneutrality among staff, when he researched them in the marketing function, asadiaphorism. This process allows people to concentrate on the technical andprocedural aspects of their work and is characteristic of the primacy of process overends that typifies the rhetorician’s stance.

Games players will try to hype their role in the organization to maintain theirposition and status. Legge (1995, pp. 317 – 24) analysed how various groups used theterminology and networks of association of HRM to meet their own interests. It iseasy enough to see how the HRD label might be used in the same way. HRDpresents its practitioners, not least by its contiguity with HRM, as a dynamic sourceof strategic advantage for their organizations. Seen from this perspective, HRD

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practitioners are less likely than traditional training offices to be delayered or (to usea neologism beginning to establish itself) disintermediated.

An example of the dangers of the stance can be taken from a research interview Iconducted as part of an earlier project (Fisher, 2000, p. 66). It concerned a managerwho had just been appointed as human resource director of a retail fashion chain.The company was taken to industrial tribunal over alleged discriminatoryrecruitment practices. The new director believed the allegations were true butnevertheless successfully defended the company at the tribunal because ‘you have toput it right from the inside’. She had relished her skill at defending an unjust causeand felt the compromise was a necessary one to enable her to establish herself withinthe company and improve things in the long term.

The ethical danger represented by the game player, the ritualist, and thepragmatist is that the compromises and accommodations they make may allow badthings to happen. They may lose their own sense of moral agency becausecompromise shifts responsibility, in part, to others.

The Ethical Limitations of Quietists

Quietism is the resignation of self to achieve contentment. It is a disengagement fromthe ethical problems of the world. It complements the prophets because it withdrawsfrom the field and leaves them free to act. It is the negation of the subjectivists’struggles with choices and the quiet opposite of noisy rhetoric. Its ethical limitation isthat a quietist HRD practitioner would not see it as their role to react to wrongdoingwithin their organization. This is the emotivist argument that morals and values arehighly personal and not matters for wider involvement. Jackall (1988) called thisprocess, of restricting ethical concerns to a personal space, bracketing.

The intellectual role exemplifies this ethical danger. It combines a willingness tostand on principle with a belief in the indeterminacy of languages and values. Theinstability of this combination leads its proponents to value the internal intellectualprocess for itself. That is their principle and it leads to disengagement.

More generally one should see the intellectual as having a special, idiosyncraticneed, a need for the ineffable, the sublime, a need to go beyond the limits, a needto use words that are not a part of anyone’s language game, any social institution.But one should not see the intellectual as serving any social purpose when hefulfills this need.

(Rorty, 1985, p. 174)

Intellectuals’ ability at language games meets the need for principle but distancesthem from the organization. Quietists would not act against unethical organizationalbehaviour. The most action they might take is to resign from an organization ofwhose behaviour they disapproved.

The Intermediate Roles

There are two HRD roles, the culture designer and the training officer, that areintermediate between the four stances. Their position on the traditionalist and neo-

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traditionalist sections of the scale suggests that they recognize the importance of allemployees ‘buying into’ an organization’s goals but their policy orientation wouldrecognize that these goals and values are not fixed. Culture designers and trainingofficers are at the point of balance between the four stances. Their ethical problem ismaintaining the equilibrium. If culture designers lose their balance they will becomemore like either prophets or subjectivists. If training officers become unbalanced theyare more likely to move towards either the quietists’ or the rhetoricians’ stances.

Culture designers, for example, try to obtain employees’ commitment toorganizational values and missions while not undermining the employees’ ownvalues. Such attempts can easily become distorted and lead to the organizationalvalues becoming the more important. This can be illustrated by some HRDpractitioners who, as was reported in the literature, used the metaphor of a car’sservice logbook to explain the purpose of personal development plans.

As with any product, if they [the staff] become out of date, no longer meet theircustomers’ requirements or ceased to offer a competitive product they would losetheir share of the market and their ability to attract customer interest. Learninglogs were also encouraged in this way – ‘who would buy a second hand car withoutthe service history and the log book?’

(Floodgate and Nixon, 1994)

Such approaches extend the demand for employees to fit themselves to theirorganization’s needs from the arena of competence into the realm of values. Theorganization’s mission statement and statement of core values are used to bringemployees into conformity with the organization’s official culture. As oneorganizational manager expressed it when discussing a colleague, about whoseperformance he had doubts:

we used the purpose and values statement to illustrate her style and to suggest thatthere’s another way of doing things. If you knew this woman you would think thatthis must really be hard work; but for some strange reason it wasn’t. It was a reallyopen discussion and one where she was able to take the comments on board andactually the purposes and values statement helped us there. . ..She wasn’t living thepurposes and values and all we had to do was to bring her back to these because,actually, she was disrespecting the values and purposes statement.

(Fisher, 2001. p. 147)

There is a contradiction within this approach. It requires an employee to confrontand take responsibility for the limitations in their portfolio of values andcompetencies, but those limitations are defined by a comparison with a competencyframework and set of core values that were designed to meet the needs of theorganization and not necessarily those of the individual. In developing themselves toconform to these expectations the employee might be distorting or denying their ownvalues and ethical positions. In these situations the culture designer takes on theprophet’s mantle.

The training officer role is often stereotypically presented as the opposite of a ‘can-do’ approach. As one report of the early 1970s, quoted by Kenney and Reid put it:

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training is a means of. . .developing people to meet the requirements of the job tobe done. . ..Any attempt to extend the expertise of the training officers into broaderhuman resource specialist roles is to change the trainer into. . .a more exotic rolethat would be beyond the aspiration of all but a small minority of training officers.

(Kenney and Reid, 1986, p. 33)

Those in this role are unlikely to become prophet like. If people in this role over-balance they will withdraw into more passive roles. The ethical danger results from alack of ambition. This can take one of two forms. If the training officer lackscommitment they will become games players, with little more expectation than tokeep their jobs. If they lack belief in their power to make things better, they willbecome quietists.

Conclusions

I have sought to present in this paper a model that can be used to plot the variousethical limitations or dangers that the different roles that HRD practitioners may takeare prey to. The semiotic square has been the chosen tool for the task. It has been builtaround a descriptive matrix of HRD roles. These have not simply been divided intogood and bad roles. All the roles have been argued to possess potential ethical dangersthough the problems are not necessarily all equally damaging. The logic of Figure 3suggests that the culture designer and training officer roles are potentially less harmfulthan the other roles. It is not argued the ethical dangers will necessarily be realized.Most prophets do good not harm; the angst of the subjectivists does notautomatically hurt others. Aporia can be a good thing in counselling and in processconsultation. It is simply being argued that the different roles may fail ethically indistinctive ways; and the purpose of this paper has been to identify the natures ofthose potential ethical failures. At this stage the paper may only help to improveunderstanding of the ethical challenges facing HRD; more work will need to be donebefore the analysis can be used to inform individuals’ HRD practices.

The semiotic square imposes a logical discipline on the analysis presented in thepaper. However, the analysis might also be subject to an empirical test to see whetherits dimensions, roles, and stances are ones that practitioners recognize in themselvesor in others. If the dimensions and categories of the semiotic square analysis can bestatistically validated against the views and beliefs of HRD practitioners then theymight be converted into a questionnaire or inventory that locates practitioners’ self-perceptions within the semiotic square. These are matters for future papers. For thepresent, the paper has tested, successfully it is argued, the semiotic square analysisfor theoretical consistency and prima facie evidence that it captures the ethicaldilemmas HRD practitioners may face.

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