– that of being caught in the middle of the two conflicting discourses ofempowered knowledge creation and instrumental performance requirements. Heencourages the reader to resist the pragmatic default position of traditionalprescriptive pedagogy and to embrace an alternative creative inquiry.

The critical lens is turned on critical approaches to HRD in section 4. Inchapters 10 and 11, Valerie Owen-Pugh and Leonard Holmes both identify thatalternative liberatory paradigms have the potential to have oppressive as well asemancipatory outcomes. In chapter 12 the editors of this volume, Trehan, Riggand Stewart, debate the lack of translation of critical management education tocritical management practice, concluding that critical HRD will not achieve itsaspirations when it is based on humanistic student-centred aspirations for socialequality but only when it encompasses analysis of power, politics, social dynamicsand emotions.

Overall, this is an important text for researchers, teachers and practitioners inHRD. The significance of a critical approach to HRD is eloquently underscoredby the words of the editors on page 10:

… HRD practitioners ought not only to be conscious but also to beconcerned that their interventions within the organization, whether aseducationalists, as internal HRD professionals, or as external HRDconsultants, impact the ways organization members make choices and takeactions which have political consequences on the environment, on theexploitation of people or on the extremes of wealth and poverty.

References

Freeman, R.E. 1999. Divergent stakeholder theory. Academy of Management Review 24(2):233–6.

Greenwood, M., and H. De Cieri. 2006. Stakeholder theory and the ethics of human resourcemanagement. In Ethics in human resource management and employment relations, eds A.Pinnington, R. Macklin and T. Campbell, 119–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Michelle Greenwood, Monash University

John Shields. 2007.Managing employee performance and rewardISBN 13 978 0 52182 046, 594 pages; A$89.95; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

I have long felt that the topic of reward management suffers significant neglect inthe human resource management curriculum of most Australian universities. Theoversight occurs not because the topic is excluded from the teaching program, butmore that it is approached on a somewhat piecemeal, chapter-by-chapter basis aspresented in standard HRM tomes. To me, as a practitioner, this approach does

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not adequately capture the integrative role that rewards, and the process of theirdesign and delivery, serve in the world of work.

I maintain that the fundamental reward design issue is to tackle a quitesimple proposition – ‘how much, of what, to whom and why?’ In addressing thisproposition we need to have a cohesive and holistic approach to the role andmanagement of people at work. I believe that Managing employee performance andreward by John Shields provides such an approach.

The key to Shields’ treatment of performance and reward lies in the concep-tually critical framework he applies to the subject matter. From the outset he iden-tifies three alternative approaches to understanding performance and reward:prescriptive, descriptive and critical. As the author notes, his intention is torepresent ‘a series of delicate balancing acts’ between the what to do and how todo it while simultaneously challenging the reader whether to do it.

While these ‘balancing acts’ are evident throughout the text, I was particu-larly drawn to the way they played out in chapter 4 ‘Being strategic and getting fit’.In this chapter Shields contrasts the prescriptive ‘best practice’ approach toperformance and reward design with the more organisationally contingent ‘bestfit’ approach. The outcome is a proposed model, based principally on ‘best fit’ butacknowledging the contribution of some aspects of ‘best practice’.

The book is structured around five sequential parts with each part comp-rising a series of chapters. The result is a narrative that unfolds by first presentingthe core ideas and propositions that form the basic platform underlying perform-ance and reward design (Part 1: The fundamentals) with successive partspresenting key concepts, methods and processes involved in performancemanagement (Part 2: Performance management in action), reward design (Part 3:Base pay and benefits) and performance-based pay (Part 4: Rewarding employeeperformance). The final part (Part 5: Fitting it all together) consists of a singleintegrative chapter that brings the previous themes together.

The clarity and logic of the overall structure is complemented by Shields’engaging writing style and the overall presentation of the text. There is little doubtin my mind that it will be widely used in the classroom. I would like to think thatit might find its way to a practitioner audience also.

Graham O’Neill, Mercer, Melbourne, Australia

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