Abstract
What makes something “HRD?” A common refrain about rejecting manuscripts for HRD journals, including Human Resource Development Review, is because the articles are not perceived as being relevant to “HRD.” To many, for example, HRD is bound by geography; namely, it takes place within the context of formal (and usually corporate) organizations (Weinberger, 1998). To others, HRD extends beyond traditional boundaries of organizations and can be applied not only nationally, but cross-nationally (Wang & McLean, 2007).
Recently, Nick Nissley (2011) wrote an article arguing for the importance of exploring “place” within the field of HRD. Nissley focused his argument on physical, geographic places, with an emphasis on natural settings. These places are extra-organizational. In other words, they are not confined within the physical boundaries of organizations and yet they are still connected to the meaningful work, learning, and activities of and in organizations. The study of place extends our understanding of the boundaries of HRD to a different dimension rather than simply expanding the “size” or “scope” of the collectives that are relevant for study (e.g., nations).
Similarly, I suggest the field HRD should reconceptualize its boundaries by thinking of “spaces” in which its practice occurs. Typically, an “organization” is defined in one of two ways (Morrill & Rudes, 2010). The traditional functionalist definition is that an organization is a “goal-directed collective” and a more interpretive definition is that an organization is a normative collective understood through its social milieu. I argue that HRD professionals need to loosen their definitions of what constitutes an “organization” that is relevant for the study and practice of HRD to meet the changing environment of the future. This is not a new argument; Stewart (2007), for example, uses a “deliberately loose” (p. 68) definition of organization suggesting that HRD may look instead at “social collectives” (p. 68). But this broader conceptualization infrequently occurs. Thus, my goal here is to provide an example of a type of nontraditional organization to encourage greater understanding of different kinds of “spaces” that can constitute relevant topics for HRD.
One such space can be found in social movements, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in the United States and has spread internationally to more than 900 cities globally (Adam, 2011). Tilly (1998) notes that social movements are “strongly-patterned transactions within interlocking networks” (p. 456) that “include actors, ties, and identities, often include roles, groups, and organizations, but never sum up to a single solidary group” (p. 456). And, yet, Madrigal (2011) noted that the Occupy movement is “Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that’s surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions” (para. 1); this lends itself to understanding social movements, through an interpretive lens, as organizations (Morrill & Rudes, 2010). Social movements can be seen as an emergent type of organizational form that holds the promise for fostering democratic ideals within the workplace (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996). In this way, I see social movements as central to the practice of Critical HRD. They are a new form of organization in their own right, worthy of study; but they are also instrumental in facilitating change within other, traditional organizations.
As I watched the news footage of protestors in Occupy Wall Street and its various offshoots, I began to wonder how HRD could play a role in facilitating the movement. The movement had established a substantial organizational infrastructure to make resources available for the protestors—information centers, medical centers, libraries, press centers, and more (Hanek, 2011). How were newcomers oriented? How did protestors make decisions about what steps to take next? How did they communicate decisions? How did members access resources to learn about their protest activities?
These are all questions that address what HRD could do to serve social movements, all of which face such issues. But I contend that such social movements can also serve HRD. I have made earlier calls to the field of HRD that our role is to help “employees learn to learn, learn to reflect and learn to question so that they can meaningfully engage” (Callahan, 2010, p. 321) in making choices about their work. Social movements can help push us out of our happy complacency (Sandlin & Callahan, 2009) in doing our jobs to make us reflect on what we are doing and perhaps to take risks to engage in something unfamiliar.
Thus, not only are social movements relevant to HRD, but they may be important to the future of our practice. We could ask not only what HRD can do for and within social movements but also what social movements can do for HRD. And what other “spaces” can HRD illuminate, and be illuminated by? We might expand our vision to online discussion forums, social networking media like Facebook or Twitter, community groups, informal learning networks, or other similar “spaces” of learning in social collectives.
As the field of HRD is confronted by new forms of organizing, such as the Occupy Wall Street social movement, we are given an opportunity to step out of our comfort zone of what constitutes an “organization.” Reio (2007) contends that, “Instead of being satisfied with what we already know, we strive to know more about what we do not, and according to Dewey, this is the only way we can come to know or learn” (p. 7). I don’t want the field to be satisfied with what we think we “know” is HRD. Let’s take some risks and think creatively about how to see different kinds of social collectives as “spaces” for HRD so we can continue to shape our identity as a field that is relevant to the engagement of learning in “organizations.”