Kierkegaard and Indirect Communication

Kierkegaard’s Leveling

As noted, one of the critiques of Kierkegaard’s thought was that he was asocial and developed no interest in the communal aspects of human existence. However, it is in the generally overlooked nonpseudonymous and religious authorships where Kierkegaard’s social and political thought materializes (Ferreira, 2001). These include Two Ages (1846/1978), Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing (1847/1956), The Point of View on My Work as an Author (1859/1998), Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847/1993), and his journals. In these works Kierkegaard engages in the concepts and questions of community, employment, political, and societal issues, and the place of the individual in them (Herrmann, 2008; Smith, 2005).

In particular, Kierkegaard critiqued and examined two related concepts of modern society: leveling and “the crowd.” In Two Ages (1846/1978), Kierkegaard examined the communicative activities of chatter, everyday talk, the press, and the commodification of discourse; activities involved in a process Kierkegaard called “leveling.” Leveling is a communicative and discursive process that takes the individual out of his or her self and makes him or her one of the public—what Kierkegaard called “the crowd.” Kierkegaard charged leveling helps to create “the crowd”—a homogeneous abstraction where all individuals become interchangeable, where no one lives as an individual, but lives solely within the definitions of the crowd’s monological voice (Hannay, 1982; Pattison, 2002). As Kierkegaard (1859/1998) noted: “Every individual who flees for refuge in the crowd, and so flees in cowardice from being an individual . . . such a man contributes his share of cowardliness to the cowardliness which we know as the ‘crowd’” (p. 115).

For Kierkegaard, “the crowd is untruth” (1859/1998, p. 115) because by comparing our lives to the lives of others we create secondhand needs, desires, and definitions of selfhood—of how we think we are supposed to live. Once in the crowd a person no longer looks inward to find subjective meaning for life, nor turns outward to uplift others. Rather, “gossip and rumor and chimeric significance and apathetic envy become a surrogate for each and all . . . individuals mutually thwart and contravene each other . . . like a swamp—and now they are sitting in it” (Kierkegaard, 1859/1998, p. 63). The constructed reality of the crowd “in its very concept is untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it by a fraction” (Kierkegaard, 1846/1978, p. 112). In other words, by following accepted social norms I can fool myself into thinking am acting ethically, erroneously believing I am not responsible, and refuse to be answerable for my actions. Leveling prevents individuals from acting as individuals, and allows for the deflection of responsibility away from the individual onto the crowd. The crowd “is untruth because it is a replacement of subjectivity with objectivity, of qualitative interiority with quantitative exteriority” (Tester, 1998, p. 104).

The communicative practices that act as levelers remove us from our individual responsibility, replacing them with objective, ready-made identities, and roles within which we can hide (Sarkar, 2000). One’s personal and individual commitments are abandoned when one gives him or herself over to the crowd, by unquestioningly accepting the socially constructed meanings of one’s self. When individuals in a society limit their self-understanding to that of detached disinterested abstract observers, they effectively level each other as well as the basis for moral decision-making (Herrmann, 2008; Tester, 1998).

“The trend today is in the direction of mathematical equality, so that in all classes about so and so many uniformly make one individual” (Kierkegaard, 1846/1978, p. 85). How does leveling connect with HRD and socialization? Organizations socialize new members so they are enculturated: to learn the mores, values, customs, and rituals of the workplace. They also want neophytes to understand the practices, processes, and their functional roles within their departments, positions, and organizations. Many of these processes occur during various HRD programs, as reviewed below.

Orthodox Approaches to HRD

While this is not the space for a full review of HRD and organizational socialization practices, an appraisal will help frame the issue and how it connects to Kierkegaard’s ideas of leveling and the crowd. There are a number of traditions within HRD, including resource-based and human capital, critical, feminist, and postmodern. This section reviews what is oft considered the orthodox—or realist—view of HRD and organizational socialization, which will be followed by a review of critical HRD scholarship.

The resource-based and human capital views of the firm are rooted in organizational economics literature, where theories of profit and competition concentrate on the internal resources of the firm as the foremost determinant of success (Schuler, 1992; Weinberger, 1998). From an orthodox perspective, HRD practices are the organizational activities intended for the management of human capital, guaranteeing that capital is employed towards organizational goals. There is extensive agreement that a strategic approach to HRD entails proposing and executing internally consistent policies and practices that guarantee employees’ collective knowledge, skills, and abilities add to the success of its organizational objectives (Garavan, 2007; Johnson & Leach, 2001). The resource-based view suggests that a firm’s pool of human capital can and should be controlled and utilized, providing a source of competitive advantage.

From this orthodox view, one primary function of HRD is to help socialize newcomers through three major phases: (a) anticipatory, (b) encounter, and (c) metamorphosis (Johnson & Leach, 2001; Kramer, 2010). Organizational anticipatory socialization involves learning about a particular job and organization. During this learning period, prospective members begin to internalize the beliefs and values of the organization to which they desire to affiliate. Through company literature, websites, and interaction with teachers, interviewers, organizational members, and network ties, individuals develop expectations about a prospective career. Three specific sources of information have been examined regarding organizational anticipatory socialization: (a) recruitment, (b) accuracy of expectations, and (c) the employment interview (Anderson & Killenberg, 1999).

The encounter phase of organizational socialization begins when the newcomer enters the workplace. While functional role socialization is important, organizational culture is considered more important because it includes organizational customs, espoused values, norms, organizational climate, rituals, traditions, and shared meanings (Herrmann 2011; Jablin, 2001; Taomira, 1997). Organizations socialize newcomers across a number of dialectics: collective/individual, formal/informal, sequential/random, fixed/variable, serial/disjunctive, and investiture/divestiture (Ashforth & Saks, 1996; Jablin, 2001). According to Ashford and Saks (1996) institutional tactics (collective, formal, sequential, fixed, serial, investiture) and individual tactics (individual, informal, random, variable, disjunctive, divestiture) have different outcomes. The institutional tactics “promote a more loyal workforce” while the individualized tactics “promote role innovation and superior performance” (p. 170). Socialization studies suggest institutionalized socialization tactics are related to lower role ambiguity, less role conflict, fewer intentions to quit, higher job satisfaction, more effective task mastery, and greater organizational commitment (Ashforth & Saks, 1996; Saks & Ashforth, 1997).

Upon entry, most organizations provide new employees with some type of oral and written orientations to their workplace, many of which occur via HRD departments (Holton, 1996). HRD orientations generally provide a congenial welcome, a historical overview of the organization, products, and services the organization provides, employee benefits, various policies and procedures, a mission statement, and an organizational philosophy (Jablin, 2001). Similarly, the newcomer is introduced to key staff members and departments. More often than not, orientation programs supply the newcomer and the organization a checklist to make certain necessary information is covered appropriately. As Jablin (1987) noted, “from the organization’s perspective, the effective communication of policy-related information is essential, if for no other reason than that the organization is often legally bound to communicate such information to employees . . . ” (p. 698). Viewed from the orthodox perspective, HRD communicative practices to the new employee are unidirectional, top-down, and information providing.

In the metamorphosis phase, the new employee becomes “an accepted, participating member of the organization by learning new behaviors and attitudes and/or modifying existing ones” (Jablin & Krone, 1987, p. 713). Important to this process of adjustment are other organizational members, who assist newcomers by providing knowledge, feedback, role models, social support, and entry to expansive networks (Herrmann, 2011). Predictably, newcomers find supervisors, peers, and senior colleagues the most available and helpful information sources (Johnson & Leach, 2001). Likewise, frontline boundary spanning employees, such as receptionists and administrative assistants, are particularly adept at helping newcomers “learn the ropes” (Louis, Posner, & Powell, 1983/2006). Through a turning point—a critical moment in the relationship between the individual and the organization—the newcomer becomes a full-fledged insider. Eventually through these processes, a newcomer internalizes the rules, norms, and expectations of an organization. By defining herself in terms of organizational processes and culture, the newcomer takes supposedly given realities for granted and becomes immersed within given definitions of organizational roles and rules.

As employees become more comfortable within an organizational culture, they begin to individuate, differentiating between the rules and norms that need to be followed and those that can be ignored without consequence. They begin to behave in ways that both conform to and transform existing organizational rules. According to most organizational socialization scholarships, individualization occurs within organizational discourses, culture, and structure (Jablin, 2001; Kramer, 2010).

The orthodox approach to organizational socialization depicts the newcomer as a passive recipient of HRD programs and practices. However, a second line of organizational socialization research emerged in which the newcomer is an active agent in her socialization (Ellinger, 2004; Kramer, 2010). One research approach that developed to understand individual activity during socialization is concerned with newcomers’ individual, psychological, and personality differences. Research on these variables shows these differences influence newcomers’ socialization as does the similar concept of behavioral self-management (Chen & Klimoski, 2003; Holland, 1996; Kramer, 2010; Saks & Ashforth, 1997). One difficulty with the concept of individual differences and other person–organization or person–job fit constructs is that they view identity (i.e., individual differences) as a stable inner core, rather than a communicative and hence relational process (Eisenberg, 2007; Herrmann, 2012c).

Since the 1990s, researchers have shown role-related learning and cultural learning are the core of organizational socialization (Chalofsky & Krishna, 2009; Saks & Ashforth, 1997). Scholars developed a number of models to represent what a newcomer needs to be socialized properly into an organization (Haueter, Macan, & Winter, 2003; Ostroff & Kozlowski, 1992; Taormina, 1997). While attempts to model organizational socialization are valuable, they often promote a managerial perspective, attempting to help organizations socialize newcomers more efficiently and economically (Bullis & Stout, 2000). In short, these models depict organizational socialization as a neutral, balanced, and value-free process, ignoring the implicit political and power issues involved. The following section briefly outlines some major critiques of orthodox HRD and organizational socialization practices from critical, feminist, and postmodern perspectives. These critiques open up a space whereby a Kierkegaardian approach to HRD may be developed.

Critical Approaches to HRD

The orthodox approaches to HRD socialization processes have not gone unchallenged (Heeyoung, Kuchinke, & Boulay, 2009). Critical, feminist, and postmodern HRD and organizational researchers problemetize the orthodox approach focusing attention on embodiment (Trehan, 2004), ethnicity (Allen, 2000), feminism (Bierema, 2002), gender (Collins, 2012), and the power of organizational narratives (Krizek, 1998). One critique of orthodox HRD is that since employees are considered a resource, HRD training, policies, and plans are designed not for the human being occupying those positions, but for organizational ends (Ashcraft, 2006). According to critical and feminist scholarship, what is missing or overlooked in orthodox accounts of HRD is the individual agency and lived experiences of the newcomer (Bierema, 2009). This critical approach incorporates Foucauldian applications to HRD practices (O’Donnell, McGuire, & Cross, 2006; Trehan, 2004). Foucault (1994) said his goal was to develop the history of how human beings are made subjects—or socially constructed—through various disciplinary discourses. Through managerial and professional discourses employees are constructed in various ways: productive, enterprising, expert, unproductive, unmotivated, and so on (Alvesson & Wilmott, 2002; Herrmann, 2012a). A Foucauldian approach reimagines HRD.

From a Foucaldian view, HRD provides a locus of disciplinary practices designed to control employee conduct. Foucault’s opus indicates the importance of, and interrelationships between, power and knowledge (1980). Many HRD scholars challenge the idea of organizational socialization as a neutral value-free linear process (Elliot & Turnbull, 2005). For example, Hughes (2005) noted processes of domination, subordination, and marginalization are produced and reproduced through socialization activities and communicative action. Costello (2006) found women and students of color display identity dissonance during socialization. Perriton (2005) emphasizes identities, relationships, and individual performances of emotion. A number of HRD practices have been examined via a Foucaldian lens, including: academic socialization, accounting practices, production and management, management education and development, performance appraisals, health and safety, and management competencies (Herrmann, 2012b; Townley, 1998; Trehan, 2004).

Simultaneously, employees have the ability through disciplinary technologies of the self to reflect upon, shape, govern, and be responsible for their selves within these discourses and resources of power, to transfigure themselves to achieve a definite condition “of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault, 1994, p. 225). In other words, people reflect upon themselves and ask, “What type of employee do I want to be?” “What must I do to become the employee I want to be?” This disciplining of the self is enterprising, a continual project of self-construction and creation as employees take up organizational discourses and definitions and apply them to their “self.”

Despite the critiques from feminist, critical, and postmodern scholarship, the point of the orthodox approach to HRD and socialization is to help create the exemplary employee, and discipline the problematic one. The exemplary employee learns the functional and social aspects of their position, including the various rules, norms, appropriate ways of performing, and speaking. The employee is to become embedded within organizational discourses and cultural mores, and to have learned the ropes in the new organization. The use of power—both panoptic and self-disciplinary—is reminiscent of what Kierkegaard described as “leveling.”

Translated into Kierkegaardian terms, one becomes leveled when utilizing the technologies of the self within dominant discourses, and through the acceptance of the cultural norms of the organization. The subject ‘becomes’ as he or she adopts self-hood via the dominant discourses of a culture (be that a societal culture, a familial culture, or important to this exploration, an organizational culture). By comparing myself to others and following the “crowd”—even if that crowd is within a taken for granted organizational culture—I can fool myself, keeping me from acting as a responsible individual. Living according to the norms of organizational culture can allow us to deflect responsibility away from our self and onto the organizational crowd, which ultimately is not a repository for responsibility, as “the individual becomes so identified with or integrated within the social totality of which he is a member that all sense of personal uniqueness and self-responsibility evaporate” (Taylor, 2000, p. 57).

HRD and organizational socialization practices can help provide objective, ready-made identities: roles within which we can hide, by accepting the socially constructed meanings of what it means to be an individual. In fact, as suggested, HRD organizational socialization practices may encourage leveling as they promote the goal of developing individuals into organizational members. By defining herself through organizational rules, processes, and culture—the organizational discourses—the newcomer takes supposedly given realities for granted and is embedded within given definitions of organizational roles and rules. When ethical challenges arise, members often rely on the enculturated organizational self upon which to base ethical decisions.

Given that all employees are communicatively socialized into the organizational world, how might an individual be awakened to and break free of the processes of leveling? Does HRD have to be a force of domination, or a mere space for individuals to apply the technologies of the self upon themselves? How might one “awaken” an employee to be responsible, ethical, “care-full” actor, while living within the facticity of a particular organizational culture? For one possible answer, I now turn to Kierkegaard’s use of indirect communication.

Kierkegaard and Indirect Communication

Kierkegaard proposed and utilized a communicative method he adopted from Socrates, through which he attempted to encourage individuals to move from unreflectively accepting their socially constructed identities to being responsible individuals—free to make choices for themselves (Herrmann, 2008). In his Journals and Papers Kierkegaard proposed communication consists of four interrelated elements: the communicator, the receiver, the object (the subject or topic of the communication), and the communication itself (1833-1855/1967-1978, Vol. 1, p. 306). Kierkegaard differentiates indirect communication from direct communication by how the four communicative elements are considered and employed.

Information is the exclusive matter of focus in direct communication, which is the communication of knowledge, wherein neither the communicator nor the receiver is specifically significant. This direct communication is not personal and does not engage the communicator or the receiver’s full humanness. (Dialogician Martin Buber [1939/1958] would refer to this form of communication as an I–It relationship.) For example, I can teach Turner and Krizek’s (2006) meaning-centered approach to customer service. So could any other practitioner or educator with this information, although they might use another set of expressions or illustrations. The completion of the undertaking remains the same: conveying information. Direct communication “is apparent from the lowest empirical knowledge to the highest” (Kierkegaard, 1833-1855/1967-1978, Vol. 1, p. 283). Today, we might refer to this type of practice as the transmission model of communication.

For Kierkegaard there are two distinct topics of knowledge: “All knowledge is either knowing about something . . . or self-knowledge” (1833-1855/1967-1978, Vol. 1, p. 270). Kierkegaard is principally occupied with self-knowledge, particularly ethical and religious self-knowledge, rather than objective knowledge. Self-knowledge is existential. It involves the type of character the individual should develop, how one sustains relationships, and how one comes to live the good life. Direct communication—information based communication—cannot develop another person’s knowledge of self. Kierkegaard realized that a different form of communication—communication that touches another’s potentiality, that helps the others develop their capabilities—was needed. Kierkegaard refers to it as indirect communication.

Indirect communication is necessary for Kierkegaard because he believed potentiality is an a priori universal human trait. In indirect communication there is no objective information to be conveyed, rather the individual is called upon to reflect upon their self to become what he or she is to be. Kierkegaard provides an ironically humorous exchange between a sergeant and a military recruit to clarify the difference between direct and indirect communication, that is, knowing information about something compared to knowing as capability:

Kierkegaard notes one dilemma we have is we attempt to alter a way of existing into a dispassionate objective proposition. According to Kierkegaard, it is not knowing about something that is important, but how it is personally enacted. “It is not a doctrine, it is a being-able, an exercising, an existing, an existential transformation, and therefore it is slow to learn, not at all as simple and easy as the rote-learning of one more language or one more system” (1833-1855/1967-1978, Vol. 1, p. 463). One of Kierkegaard’s grievances was people ignore the primary task of the individual, which is to live, enact, and bring one’s self into being. In the illustration of the military recruit, the sergeant assumes the recruit has it within him to become a soldier similarly to how an organizational leader sees within a new employee a potential CEO.

Indirect communication is what Kierkegaard regarded as seducing into the truth (Kierkegaard, 1859/1998). By seduction—sometimes referred to as deceiving—Kierkegaard does not mean lying through direct communication (McCreary, 2011). What he means is that as a dialogic partner, the communicator disowns her own certitude, puts herself in a one down position, becoming an honest questioner. This does not mean one gives up their own beliefs, neither does it mean that one wants their communicative partner to come to understand or accept the speaker’s beliefs. The use of indirect communication eliminates the certitude of the dialogic partner, for their benefit. It allows the other to interrogate her own beliefs, character, and intentions, and dispel her illusions to make an existential, meaningful choice about her life (Gary, 2007; Sæverot, 2011).

For Kierkegaard, the principal exemplar of indirect communication and seducing into the truth was Socrates. Socrates utilized maieutic dialogue, in which he simulated ignorance, asked questions, and used jests and irony, until his conversational partners understood they did not understand, and came to realize their preconceived ideas of love, courage, or truth, etc. were at best murky. Socrates did not tell his communicative partners what he thought, but feigned ignorance and opened an autonomous arena for his communicative partners to enter into dialogue. The goal of indirect, dialogical communication is the drawing out of the potential from within the individual. Communication of capability is akin being a writer. Writing is something one does, not something one knows. It favors process and product. “Ethical communication is the communication of capability, even more specifically, oughtness-capability, but the communication is not in the direction of knowledge but of capability” (Kierkegaard, 1833-1855/1967-1978, Vol. 1, p. 281). For Kierkegaard, the communication of capability leads to edification—literally “to build up”—and transformation. To build up the individual, communication “must unequivocally demand something of the listener” (Kierkegaard, 1847/1956, p. 144).

In The Point of View on My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard (1859/1998), noted he could never compel another person to live an authentic life however he could: “compel him to become aware . . . By compelling him to become aware, I am compelling him to judge. Now he judges. But what he judges is not in my power” (p. 50). The outcome of reflection is ultimately subjective, creating in the individual a space for self-reflection and individual choice. All he could do, and what his communicative project aimed for, was to create the opening. Considering Kierkegaard’s vocation in toto, his philosophical authorship is thoroughly based on the practices of dialogue through his use of the maieutic, a phenomenon largely overlooked in HRD and organizational socialization theory.

Kierkegaard, the Workplace, and Communication

Kierkegaard was interested in all aspects of life, including the occupational. In Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing (1847/1956), Kierkegaard asks an important question about the place of work and workplace ethics in the lives of ordinary people: “What means do you use in order to carry out your occupation? Are the means as important to you as the end, wholly as important?” (p. 141). HRD, organizational scholars, employees, and employers continue to ask questions about the meaning of work and its ethical import (Hannah & Avolio, 2011; Richardson, 2001; Trethewey & Goodall, 2007). According to Kierkegaard, refusing to ask these questions is a dereliction of one’s commitments to oneself, to others, and because Kierkegaard was at heart a religious thinker, to God. If you don’t ask important ethical questions, “it is impossible for you to will only one thing, for in that case the irresponsible, the frivolous, the self-seeking, and the heterogeneous means would flow in between in confusing and corrupting fashion” (1847/1956, p. 141).

Continuing along this line of thinking, Kierkegaard also challenged utilitarian conceptions of ethics. “One thinks that the end is the main thing and demands of one who is striving that he reach the end. He need not be so particular about the means. Yet this is not so” (1847/1956, p. 141). Kierkegaard’s conception of dialogue and the communication of capability offer both theoretical and practical issues for HRD theorists to examine. Kierkegaard’s entire edifying maieutic consisted of getting individuals to understand themselves as individuals, not through the communication of new ethical perspectives or through new information, but by leading them dialogically through various life perspectives, bringing them to the proverbial water’s edge where they may (or may not) choose to drink.

Kierkegaard’s theory connects with arenas where individuals have an opportunity to fulfill their potential and come to self-realization and where facilitators might enact both direct communication (communication of knowledge) and indirect communication (communication of capability) in conjunction. Although it will always be necessary to communicate knowledge, monologic, top-down training does not necessarily engender the type of self-reflection and edification Kierkegaard envisions. Anyone who has had the opportunity to sit through a 3-hr orientation can attest to the continual direct communication they are assaulted with.

It would seem imperative that managers, human resource professionals, and others involved in the socialization of newcomers (and other employees) utilize indirect communication allowing them the space to develop their own commitments and capacities through self-reflection. Kierkegaard has specific instructions for those who would be educators, and these instructions can also pertain to educators in the workforce: “To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture or so on. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner” (Kierkegaard, 1859/1998, p. 29). This also necessitates organizational HRD practitioners be cognizant of the places they are closed off and to being open to change through dialogue. “Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it, in case you have not understood it before,” Kierkegaard (1859/1998) noted. That is the starting point. Kierkegaard continued, “Or if you have understood it before, you allow him to subject you to an examination so that he may be sure you know your part” (p. 29).

Kierkegaard offers HRD and organizational scholars an opportunity to reexamine and reconsider the dominant and monologic philosophy of employee development and training. It is important for new employees to learn their functional role in the organization and that they learn the cultural ropes. However, rather than merely inculcating organizational neophytes through the socialization processes, and turning individuals into mere members of a socially constructed organizational crowd or being utilized as a type of resource—to live “leveled”—organizational managers, trainers, and human resource personnel can glean important insights from Kierkegaard’s concept of education through indirect communication and its interrelated concepts of capability and edification.

Rather than monologic training practices, employers could open spaces for full participation on the part of employees, not only as “employees” but also as fully human individuals with multiple capabilities and potentialities. This allows employees to realize their potentialities as complete persons, rather than just as organizational members. For Kierkegaard, managing and leading consist of constant self-evaluation. “If you can do it, if you can very accurately find the place where the other person is and begin there, then you can perhaps have the good fortune of leading him to where you are” (Kierkegaard, 1859/1998, p. 46). Kierkegaard saw that we must edify others, affirm others, encourage others, and support others, without attempting to control them. From a Kierkegaardian perspective, human resources are in need of development, rather than management.

HRD and organizational communication scholars have found encouragement and confirmation, the opportunity to realize their potential, grow, and develop as immensely important to employees (Jablin, 2001). Employees “want to care about their work. They want work they can feel good about when they get up in the morning, that they look forward to and think is worthwhile” (Collins & Porras, 1993, p. 83). For Kierkegaard, edification is not simply empathy for another person, but a sincere respect for another individual’s capability, mysteriousness, possibility, privacy, and otherness (Herrmann, 2008). This is similar to walking the narrow ridge and finding moments of meeting (Cissna & Anderson, 1998). Not only must we facilitate openness in others, but also we must be open ourselves. The practice of edifying identifies and expresses equality and mutuality between individuals. In fact, edification “turns out to be an implicitly mutual relationship between two people because when we build up others we are allowing them to build up others, including us, as well” (Ferreira, 2001, p. 140). Edification through indirect communication is a dialogic practice. To be a manager, in the true sense, is to be a teacher. The indirect communication and its dialogic impetus means building up individuals beyond mere ethical understanding to ethical action and a sense of purpose that makes their work lives meaningful.

Future Directions

While this exploration of a Kierkegaardian approach to HRD and organizational socialization practices begins a conversation, it is by no means the last word. Is a Kierkegaardian approach to HRD simply another humanistic delusion, an attempt to humanize a sphere where Weberism and Fordism are simply necessary? Can it be critiqued as other humanistic approaches have: “fundamentally misguided as they fail to fully grasp or take account of the core principles that continue to underpin extant modes of capitalist production”? (McGuire, O’Donnell, & Cross, 2005). Is a Kierkegaardian edification program possible given the larger socioeconomic discourses, that is, organizations as “individuals,” maximizing shareholder value, and so on?

Putting the above questions aside, much of the capital and resource approaches to employee development are based upon economic principles. These, however, do not take into account other economic theories, such as Sen’s (1993) human capability or feminist approaches. How can capability economics and indirect communication, that is, the communication of capability, inform us and present to us concepts that we have overlooked? While Sen discusses economic capability, and Kierkegaard individual capability, the theories appear to have more than coincidental commonalities to be explored and may be complementary at the organizational macro and micro levels.

Scholars in HRD (and organizational research in general) continue to call for incorporation of dialogue in organizations and organizational resource development and training (Deetz & Simpson, 2004; Kuchinke, 2004; Li & Lin, 2011; Rosinski, 2011). Still there is a dearth of dialogic practice in organizational life (Barge & Little, 2002). There are some promising developments and a Kierkegaardian approach based upon the development of capabilities and edification may be helpful. Black’s (2005) research on workgroups found connections with both Bohm’s and Buber’s philosophies of dialogue. Herrmann, Barnhill, and Poole (in press) show how dialogic writing practices in an organization can lead to mutual understanding of situatedness and otherness. Bokeno and Gantt (2000) theorize how a dialogic approach to mentoring might be useful to both the mentor and the mentored. How does a Kierkegaardian approach contribute to and challenge other dialogic approaches to HRD in organizational settings?

Numerous scholars have pointed out that Kierkegaard’s indirect communication is definitively ambiguous and equivocal (Lübcke, 1990; Turnbull, 2009; Westphall, 2009). In organizations, ambiguity, equivocality, and uncertainty are considered problematic (Eisenberg, 2007). However, strategically ambiguous communication promotes unified diversity, fostering “the existence of multiple viewpoints in organizations” (Eisenberg, 2007, p. 8). For Eisenberg, strategic ambiguity in organizations is necessary for organizational success, rather than clear communication, because it facilitates change in organizational relationships and promotes organizational change. For the HRD practitioner the “awareness of the ambiguity of language, its role not only in interpretation but also in construction of reality” (Valentin, 2006) is not merely important, but a necessary talent. Kierkegaard’s conception of indirect communication allows for the development of individual change and growth that changes relationships and is therefore connected to Eisenberg’s (2007) concept of communicatively based strategic ambiguity in organizations; an idea that may prove useful for HRD, if considered as a way of promoting individual potentialities.

How does Kierkegaard’s conception of awakening potentialities relate to the pretzel-like questions of identity and authenticity in the workplace? Identity in postmodernity has been variously called “protean,” (Lifton, 1999), “improvisational” (Eisenberg, 1990), and “saturated” (Gergen, 1991), all of which see individuals as “ceaseless becoming” (Schrag, 1999, p. 8). The practice of indirect communication in the workplace might help untie the Gordian knot of the “real-self fake-self” workplace dichotomy perpetuated by “competing, fragmentary, and contradictory discourses” (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005) by treating the employee as a whole person. The calls for a whole-person approach in HRD are innumerable and longstanding (Bowen, Ledford, & Nathan, 1991; Gibb, 1994; Hatcher, 2006; Hertneky, 2012). Likewise, it is possible that indirect communication and the whole-person edification that results could emancipate us from the traditional work–life and public–private dichotomies, which preclude people from being their authentic selves at work (Bochner, 1997; Sennett, 1998).

Finally, what would a Kierkegaardian-based HRD actually look like? Certainly it is one thing to explore Kierkegaardian edification in the workplace conceptually, but to actualize the practice is different. How does one create training programs based on indirect communication: Open-ended and interested in developing the full potentialities of the human individual, not just those which further organizational aims? How can an organization develop HRD practices that do not lead to an organizationally leveled existence, that does not monologically socialize newcomers, while making members part of the organizational culture? Can the implementation of indirect communication in development and training activities, if not overturn the processes of leveling, at a minimum moderate them? See Table 1 for some differences to be examined that can be extrapolated for the HRD practices of organizational learning, career development, organizational socialization, training and development, organizational mentoring, and so on.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Orthodox Versus Kierkegaardian Approach to HRD.

Orthodox	Kierkegaardian
Individual seen as employee	Employee seen as individual
Utilitarian	Experiential
Top-down communication	Relational communication
Monological	Dialogical
Change avoidant	Change enhancing
Past–present orientation	Future orientation
Disconfirming	Edifying
Manager as teacher	Manager as colearner
Employee as learner	Employee as coteacher
Attempts to eliminate ambiguity	Embraces ambiguity
Identity as stable	Identity as protean

These discussions are beyond the scope of this introductory theoretical piece, but they do have potential. After all, Kierkegaard—as a writer—was prolific. He published numerous books, discourses, newspaper articles, and pamphlets. He also wrote 7,000 pages of text in journals, papers, and scraps. There is obviously much more to glean from Kierkegaard’s writings, and an expansion and interrogation of indirect communication and edification in the HRD and the workplace is one start.