critical approcahes to international hrm

8/7/2019 Critical Approcahes to International HRM

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Critical Approaches to

International Human Resource Management

Tuomo Peltonen

Department of Industrial ManagementTampere University of Technology

[email protected]

P.O. Box 541, FI-33101 Tampere, FINLAND

tel. +358 40 849 0857

04/11

Forthcoming in: Bjrkman, I. & Stahl, G. (eds.) (2011) Handbook of

International HRM Research. 2nd

Edition. Edward Elgar.


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Introduction

International Human Resource Management (IHRM) is a branch of managementstudies that investigates the design and effects of organizational human resourcepractices in cross-cultural contexts. It occupies an intriguing position in the intersticesof international business, human resource management and organizational behavior

scholarships. The field has evolved from its fragmented beginnings when for exampleLaurent (1986) defined international human resource management as being adiscipline in its infancy. International personnel questions have since then become anew professional sub-specialism for the human resource people and the discovery ofthe international people management problems has in a sense helped the occupation tore-gain some authority in the political struggle over management expertise.

However, despite of the recent advances, international human resource management israrely approached from a critical perspective, unlike many other specialist areaswithin management studies. This is somewhat surprising, since there has been agrowing interest towards critical approaches in the broader discipline of managementand organization studies. Generally speaking, critical theories aim to uncover and

change societal structures, ideologies and power relations that constitute and shape theorganizational phenomena and workplace relations (Adler, Forbes & Willmot, 2007;Alvesson & Willmot, 1996; Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). Unlike the more technicalapproaches to organizing, critical understandings of "management" emphasizescontrol and governing dimensions of administrative activities (Willmot, 1997; Grey,1999). "Human resource management", in turn, is seen in critical theories as a way ofensuring the commitment of employees to the economic goals of the businessenterprises instead of treating worker consent as a mere functional response to theindividual, organizational and environmental needs (Townley, 1994; Legge, 1995).More recently, international management has witnessed a surge of criticaldeconstructions of its uses of the concept of "culture" in organizational discourses(Prasad, 1997; Westwood, 2001; Jack, Cals, Nkomo and Peltonen, 2008).

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce critical approaches to the field ofinternational HRM. The chapter is structured as follows: the next section provides anintroduction to critical theoretical perspectives, their adaptations in managementstudies as well as to some of the more specific themes and questions relevant for acritical engagement with the role of HRM and international HRM in the structuring oforganizations. The third section first reviews briefly the current state of criticalapproaches in the contemporary discourses on IHRM research, which is followed by asection that develops tentative directions for critical theoretical research in the contextof two important debates within IHRM, namely research into HRM in MNEsubsidiaries and the study of expatriate assignments. The paper closes with a brief

reflection of the recent developments in critical thinking, especially with regard to thetheoretical and political implications of the global financial crisis.

The case for critical study of international human resource management

The field of management and organization studies was long dominated byfunctionalist paradigms (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). The last fifteen years has seen asteady increase in critical contributions to management theorizing and organizationalanalysis (Alvesson and Willmot, 1996; Grey and Fournier, 2000; Alvesson, Bridgman


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and Willmott, 2009), together with the birth of several scholarly communitiesspecializing in the non-orthodox theories and studies, including for example theInternational Critical Management Studies Conference and the Critical ManagementStudies division within the American Academy of Management.

Critical management research draws from a number of theoretical inspirations. I will

briefly introduce here three of them. The so-called labor process theory is a researchprogram that emerged after the publication of Harry Braverman's influential "Laborand Monopoly Capital" (1974). Labor process theory explores the deskillinghypothesis according to which rational management techniques, including also HRMpractices, are used to mechanize and simplify work and thus to make control of workmore efficient. Critical Theory, in turn, is a social theory movement rooted in theFrankfurt School of social philosophy. Critical Theory aims to uncover the suppressedconflict in the contemporary society by analyzing how the established understandingsof social life are contaminated by the ideological discourses and technocraticconsciousness, a theme which has been developed particularly in the writings ofJrgen Habermas (1984). Poststructuralism, on the other hand, stems from the Frenchphilosophy and is influenced by the ideas of semiotics and structuralism but also by

other continental theories like the philosophical works of Nietzsche (Schrift, 1999).Poststructuralism is in a very generalized sense interested in engaging withhierarchies and dualisms that is, with strategies of power inscribed into ourinstitutionalized notions of truth and subjectivity, and the approach has becomeknown to the English audiences mainly through the writings of Michel Foucault(1977, 1978) and Jacques Derrida (1981).

Despite of their profound differences, one can argue that the various critical theoriesshare the broadly common aim of looking at the tensions and contradictions betweenthe dominant and dominated groups and the ways in which rationality, science anddiscourse is used to affirm the power of the ruling group in society. Recently, moreemphasis has been laid on the construction of differences along the lines of gender,race, ethnicity, sexuality and nationalism, as well as on the power relations andsubjectivities emerging from the discursive constructions of sameness and otherness.This orientation has gone hand in hand with the increasing interest towardspoststructuralist approaches to the critical study of society and culture and alsotowards the development of gender and feminist studies as a viable stream of socialresearch (e.g. Calhoun, 1995; see also Hearn's, Metcalfe's and Piekkari's chapter inthis book).

Following the shift toward postmodern ideas in social sciences, the field ofmanagement and organization studies has also witnessed an increasing interest in theissues related to knowledge, discourse, power and identity (e.g. du Gay, 1996; Chia,

1996; Jacques, 1996; Clegg, Hardy and Nord, 1996). Cals and Smirchich (1999)have argued that the introduction of postmodern and poststructuralist approaches hasalready influenced the way in which sociological management research is conducted,most of all in the form of situated reflexivity towards the common sense categoriesand knowledge claims prevalent in the authorial articulations on the nature oforganizations and organizational management. Poststructuralist critique of regimesand discourses of truth has also affected earlier, broadly neo-Marxist streams ofcritical theorizing by making them more aware of the complexities of social power


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and the heterogeneity of the human subject (e.g. Clegg 1989, Knights and Willmot1989).

It is also important to note that critical theories have been used not only to deconstructthe established understandings of management and organizations in general, but alsoto critically reframe the various sub-specialisms of management (Alvesson and

Willmot 1996; Alvesson, Bridgman & Willmott, 2009). An interesting observation inthe context of this paper is that the field of human resource management - a thematicarea perhaps closest to the emerging discipline of IHRM - has also been approachedfrom critical theoretical perspectives. For example Legge (1995) has argued thatalthough the rhetoric of personnel management has seemingly shifted from the earlieremphasis on pluralism and industrial relations conflict to the prevalence of unitaristparadigms, the old contradictions and tensions associated with the management ofpaid work in the late modern societies still influence the realities of human resourcemanagement in organizations. Townley (1994) has provided another influentialcritique in which she has used the work of Foucault to look at the ways in whichHRM practices assist in making employees manageable through a number of differenttechniques that situate employees as objectified "cases" or "problems" into the

organizational grids of intelligibility. Both Legge (1995) and Townley (1994)demonstrate, from their own slightly different critical theoretical perspectives, howseemingly neutral organizational arrangements and techniques associated with thestate of the art HRM may be understood as part of the workings of power andideology.

Similarly, techniques and expertise of IHRM can be scrutinized into a criticalexamination that reveals the hidden intentions and interests behind the seeminglyneutral facade of HRM, international management and IHRM. The field of IHRMstudies and constitutes organizational practices that are similar to those found indomestic HRM, including the techniques of personnel selection, training, rewardingand career development as well as the issues related to strategic HRM. However, incontrast to domestic HRM, in IHRM, many personnel techniques are legitimized witha reference to cultural differences and cross-cultural adjustment instead of a moregeneral concern with organizational effectiveness or employee well-being (e.g. Adler2002). A critical take on IHRM would thus complement a focus on employmentrelationship with an attention paid to the ways in which culture and culturaldifferences inform, shape and legitimate various HRM practices in internationalsettings. Culture can for example be used to describe the social context of the lessdeveloped, non-Western countries whereas the Western world may be assumed asbeing "civilized". Or, alternatively, "culture" can be used politically as a motive withwhich management can introduce HR practices that serve a control function. Humanresource function or organizational leadership can for example install international

performance-monitoring systems in order to be able to better watch over the doings ofan individual manager or expert while he or she is abroad.

The central role of cultural difference in the discourse of IHRM could be seen asbroadening the scope of critical dialogues beyond the power oriented analysis of HRpractices. In the context of multiple national-cultures and cultural identities, apotential further use of critical theories would be to give voice to the marginalizedgroups and ignored constituencies and thus to challenge what is currently taken forgranted in academic theorizing on and practical orientations to organizational


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management (e.g. Cals and Smirchich 1991, Nkomo 1992). This type of criticalinquiry could critically reflect on the question of which types of social groups andemployee voices are missing in the contemporary representations of the "humanresources" of the internationally operating companies. One could, for example,observe that the employee categories currently present in the IHRM discourse includetop executives, human resource managers and the valued experts and professionals,

often in administrative or developmental tasks in the corporate hierarchy. "Keyemployees" are more often men than women and they also tend to be ethnically closerto the ideal persons cherished in the corporate cultures based on the middle classvalues of white North American and North European professionals. At the same time,various other categories of actors, such as floor-level workers, part-time and contractemployees, women, immigrants, unemployed and so on, remain only silently present.The discourse of international human resource management rarely pays attention tothe ways in which the supposedly neutral categories sustain and reproduce existingsocietal asymmetries based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality or gender, despite oftheir relevance for understanding international diversity (Prasad, Mills, Elmes, andPrasad, 1997). Although it seems that there is considerable potential for criticaltheoretical studies on the various aspects of IHRM, it might be useful first to briefly

review the extent to which critical discourses inform the contemporary researchdebates on international dimensions of human resource management.

Toward a critical research programme within IHRM: current debates andfuture avenues

A quick look at some of the most recent books reveals that there is very little writtenexplicitly on issues of power, domination and ideology in international humanresource management. For example Evans, Pucik and Barsoux (2002) note in the finalpages of their book that "inequality between the rich and poor, both within nationsand between nations.has worsened during the last quarter century, and notablyduring the 1990"s." but also pinpoint that "[a]fter all, the HR function cannot doanything about such complex issues". The interpretations put forward here by Evanset al. may seem self evident to the students of an MBA class. However, many criticalstudents of organization start with the assumption that management techniques andmodels are ideologically biased and that they are indeed part of the public molding ofsocial relations in the name of managerial rationality (Deetz, 1992; Alvesson &Willmot, 1996). As noted earlier, HRM cannot be regarded as neutral or instrumentalin its relation to the objects of managing; instead, it is deeply implicated in thesteering of organizational members" thoughts and behaviors a point demonstratedfor example by Townley (1994) in her re-reading of the role of HR techniques in the

management of organizations. Following the credo of such critical thinking, it can beargued that although the macro level inequalities of the world portrayed in thetextbooks as demonstrations of global ethical issues may be too grand for theorganizational behavior concerns of the IHRM scholars, there are plenty ofopportunities to engage critically with the organizational distortions and injustices thatare evident at the workplace level of the international business enterprises.

If we then explore the emerging debates from other scholarly sources, especiallyjournals, the range of available critical interrogations of IHRM seems to be even


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narrower than in the context of textbooks. I searched for critically pitched articlesfrom the International Journal of Human Resource Management - the current housejournal for the IHRM discipline - by entering keyword "ideology" to the electronicdatabase search covering all volumes of IJHRM (date: 26.10.10). My assumption wasthat the existence of this central critical theory word in the titles of the papers mightindicate that the contents of the full paper would contain some sort of engagement

with the critical debates on IHRM phenomena. However, the search produced a meretwo papers with an explicit reference to ideology in their title, both published in the2000s. It is of course possible that I could have missed the articles that engage withthe non-orthodox perspectives despite of their conventionalist titles, but, on the otherhand, it is more probable that the result from the journal database search documents awider paucity of critical studies of international human resource managementphenomena in the journals devoted to the advancing of the discipline.

HRM practices in MNE subsidiaries

At the same time, however, some of the recent research contributions within the fielddo engage with critically loaded concepts such as organizational power. Ones such

IHRM debate where power has appeared recently concerns the structuring of HRMpractices in the MNE's (Rosenzweig & Nohria, 1994; Hannon et al, 1995; Ferner &Quantanilla, 1998). The standard research contributions in this stream of IHRMresearch are based on relatively straightforward empiricist analyses of the structuralforms of MNE's in relation to the organization of HRM. One of the foci throughwhich the issues around global integration/convergence/centralization versusdifferentiation/divergence/decentralization have been dealt with is the study ofsubsidiary HR strategies. As Ferner and Quantanilla (1998) have proposed, HRMpractices that are transferred from the headquarters to the subsidiaries can remainrooted in the corporate or home country norms and values or can be adapted to thelocal context, depending on the organizational-contextual contingencies.

Empirical studies tend to suggest that, in general, MNE's prefer centralization overdifferentiation (Bonache 2000), although results vary across contexts. Anyway, giventhat there is at least tentative bias towards standardization in MNE behavior, there is aneed to explain why corporations resort to global uniformity when the literature ontransnational HR management suggests that contextual variety of the differentorganizational units needs to be taken into account in the implementation ofmanagement policies at the local level (e.g. Sparrow and Hiltrop, 1997).Organizational power comes here into picture as a way of theoretically andempirically accounting for the resources that the MNE headquarters and theirmanagers use to impose their preferred HR norms and standards to the local unit. Oneof the most articulate contributions of a power explanation comes from Bjrkman and

Lu (2001), who in their study of the Chinese-Western joint ventures introduce aframework from organization theory that employs ideas from institutional theory(Scott, 2001) and resource dependency approach to organizational power (Pfeffer &Salancik, 1978). They argue that standardization of HRM follows to a large extentfrom the process during which the Western parties acquire power resources withwhich to impose their parochial preferences to the Chinese organizations and actors,along with the adaptation of institutionalized managerial beliefs, which put globalunity on a pedestal.


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Critical accounts of MNE power in host country subsidiaries would differ from theexisting notions in that social power would be seen as being deeper and moreconstitutive than in the views approaching power as an empirically observableresource (cf. Frost and Egri, 1991). Instead of analyzing power as external to theemergence of a particular HR design, the focus in critical theories, especially inapproaches influenced by Foucault's (1982) conception of "positive power", tends to

be more on how power is constructed in the course of organizing the relations andidentities of main actors (Clegg, 1989; Hardy and Clegg, 1996). Thus, rather thanunderstanding "power" as a mechanism or structure that explains whether a locallytailored or globally integrated human resources strategy gets implemented in a giveninstitutional context, the emergence of the more fundamental, prior asymmetrybetween the actors is seen as something that needs to be described and accounted for.This implies a view where "power" of the multinational corporations and their centralmanagement apparatus is seen as not being possible before other actors have joinedthe evolving collectivity and accepted the proposed roles and responsibilities as thebasis of their participation in the "transfer" of management techniques (Latour, 1986).

For example post-colonial theory (Said, 1978; Prasad, 2003) starts with the

assumption that power relations between colonizers and colonized cannot be fullyunderstood by focusing on resources and structural forces leading to coercion of thebehavior of the dominated. Instead, power emerge in this approach as an effect ofconstructing and molding the identity of both of the participants in a relation,implying that the colonized are also playing a part in crafting, internalizing and livingthe conditions that make power and asymmetry possible in an evolving organizationalconnection.

Equipped with a positive or relational view on social power, critical analysis of globalhomogenization could start by asking more specific questions about the constructionof core/periphery-relations and the structuring of power in decision making on IHRM.The research questions could include: who defines the reality of organization? Howthe identities of headquarters and various subsidiaries are negotiated and howsubsidiary managers take on the role of "local" executives representing something"smaller" and "more peripheral" than the units in the symbolic and political core ofthe contemporary world economy? How different national, cultural and ethnic groupsof employees are defined and talked about and are there visible differences betweenthe identities of the "Western"/"developed" and the "non-Western"/"developing"managers and experts? How is the need for "Western"/"rational"/"standardized" HRpractices in the remote subsidiaries legitimated and naturalized? Whose rationalityprevails and how consent to corporate imperialism is manufactured in the non-Western subsidiaries? What kind of resistance emerges in the subsidiaries and how isit tempered into "revolt behavior"?

These are just some suggestive questions that might advance the study of power andHRM in MNE's from a critical theoretical perspective. Whereas the dynamics of therelations between the centre and the periphery of transnational corporations leadrelatively easily to consider power analytics and critical investigations of internationalbusiness management as research frameworks, the study of expatriates, repatriates andcultural adjustment has usually been seen as a province of psychologist andindividualistic research debates. However, processes related to expatriate life could


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also provide some interesting insights into the workings of power, discourse andidentity in the international settings.

Expatriate research

Expatriates and their adjustment, performance and repatriation constituted a central

topic for IHRM research in its formative years (e.g. Mendenhall Dunbar and Oddou,1987), and the debate still goes on in the field. Studies in this area typically look at theindividual level processes and problems related to international job mobility ofcorporate professionals, often within big multinational companies (Thomas, 1998).However, the focus of the debate has slightly shifted from the psychological issuesaround cross-cultural and practical problems to an emphasis on expatriates as part ofthe human capital of the firm. The extraordinary quality of the internationalassignments is beginning to vanish in connection to this change of perspective ascontemporary expatriate studies tend to look at the globally mobile employees as"strategic resources" and future global managers, rather than as "complex humans"encountering adjustment problems and career discontinuities (e.g. Inkson, Arthur,Pringle and Barry, 1997).

The transition towards a more strategic or HRM perspective on internationalassignments means, to some extent, that the research discourse on expatriates hasmoved away from the theoretical traditions of cross-cultural and social psychologythat informed the early stages of expatriate research. While the conventionalorganizational and work psychology that conceptualizes individuals as atomistic unitsmight have little to offer to critical social theories of management and business, therecent currents in psychology of organizations as well as in psychology proper putmore emphasis on social and contextual underpinnings of human behavior (Nord andFox, 1996). In a relatively general level the recent development in expatriate researchcould then be criticized on the basis that its leaning on the theories of strategic humanresource management makes it more difficult to think about and theorize expatriatesas individuals-in-context, especially to understand how internationally mobileemployees" work and career processes are affected and affect the wider circuits ofpower and control in international business.

One example of how critical ideas about identities could inform the empiricalinvestigation of expatriates comes from my own work. In a theoretical synthesis ofmy works on expatriates, repatriates and their career processes (Peltonen, 1998), I tryto conceptualize the negotiation of the organizational and personal identities as astruggle over the stability and change of power positions in a Finnish subsidiary of amultinational corporation used as the case company. With the help of extensivequalitative material, I look at the discursive attempts of expatriates and repatriates to

challenge, resist and change the established hierarchies among professional engineersand managers in an engineering corporation. My study locates beliefs, meanings andidentity work of the expatriate employees to the ongoing construction of powerrelations. The empirical focus is on the self-categorizations and accounts expatriatesand other employees gave about their standing in the social web of organization aswell as on their views about their professional and managerial motivations andorientations. However, the interpretation given to qualitative data tries to revealpatterns in the identities constructed and to find links between observed subjectpositions and organization and industry level social structures and power relations.


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The influences flowing from social structures to expatriate life notwithstanding, thepractical circumstances surrounding expatriates and other internationally mobile "keypersons" have a constitutive role in the changing material arrangements ofglobalization. At the same time as international networking and global careers are

becoming "business as usual" for the professional and managerial employees of thecorporate sector, the rest of workforce, especially in low-income jobs, are still verymuch tied to its local community. Most of the expatriate employees studied withinIHRM are white-collar experts and corporate executives for whom moving from onelocation to another is not particularly problematic since they are considered "okay" inthe eyes of the global political and safety institutions. Unlike the masses of immigrantworkers who are forced to try to seek for better opportunities in the industrialcountries, the authorities of the host countries normally welcome the corporate andbusiness expatriates. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1998; 2000) has noted in thiscontext, the business traveler or expatriate and the immigrant worker could be seen asthe two sides of the same coin of globalization in that without the existence of theglobal army of low-paid "susceptible persons" there would not be the phenomenon of

corporate expatriation and international business traveling. However, I am not awareof any published paper in the IHRM field that would have contrasted corporateexpatriates with immigrant workers, although the issue is topical in the more generaldialogues on transnational organizations and globalization (Sassen, 1998; Banerjeeand Linstead 2001; Hearn, 2004). Overall, lifestyles and social arrangementssurrounding expatriates and other internationally mobile professionals could be afruitful topic for future critical analyses on globalization of work and employmentmanagement (cf. Peltonen, 2005; 2007).

Recent developments in critical thinking: the big picture

Since the first edition of this Handbook came out in 2006, critical research has seenseveral promising developments. International management debates were added a newcritical flavor, alongside other contemporary inputs, with the publication of a specialtopic forum on International management and critique in the Academy ofManagement Review. In their introduction, the guest editors Jack, Calas, Nkomo andPeltonen (2008) pointed out how management research as an intellectual and practicalactivity has become more contested as the result of the introduction of alternativeparadigms, such as the various critical and postmodern approaches. Given thebroadening of the approaches to management and organizing during the last twentyyears or so, it is surprising, they argue, that international management (IM)theone management subfield that could have been better attuned to these concerns given,by definition, its international grasp and its putative eye to the whole of the

worldhas been perhaps the most resistant to adopt a critical metatheoreticalreflexivity on the knowledge it has produced for over fifty years. IM, be itcomparative/cross-cultural management, the national business systems approach,institutionalist perspectives, or the intersections of all of these with the broaderinternational business (IB) literature and its focus on the multinational corporation(MNE), has remained for the most part firmly rooted in traditional functionalistpositivism, with little reflexivity about the claims and consequences of such anepistemological stance. (Jack, Cals, Nkomo and Peltonen, 2008; 871).


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With this declaration, Jack et al. (2008) discuss a number of shortcomings in thecritical self-understanding of IM/IB. The main drive of their paper and the collectionof articles published in the special issue is to disturb the prevailing hegemony of thediscourse of international management, including not only the way in which thenature of its objects (predominantly, the behavior of MNEs) is being approached, butalso the way in which various texts and authors represent and frame the phenomenon

at hand, thus bringing into existence these objects. Whereas the former is betterknown from the analyses of power and domination in MNEs (Drrenbcher &Geppert, 2011), the latter implies a more philosophical questioning of the establishedepistemologies within the science of international management. This isdemonstrated through a number of scholarly interrogations such as accomplishing acritical reading of Geert Hofstedes canonical text using his own cultural categories(Ailon, 2008), using a metaphor of cultural friction instead of that of distance inunderstanding cross-cultural interaction (Shenkar & Luo, 2008) or taking a stock ofthe many ways colonial divisions permeate the understanding of cultural differencesin theory and practice of international management (zkazan-Pan, 2008; Frenkel,2008). This type of dual attention to the workings of power and ideology, both in theanalysis of the behavior of multinational organizations and its actors, as well as in the

textual deconstructions of hegemonic representations and discourses (cf. De Cieri,Cox & Fenwick, 2007), might also serve as a model for a potential researchprogramme for critical IHRM studies.

At the same time, the business world out there drifted into what has turned out to bethe worst economic recession in a lifetime. The global economic crisis, whichgathered momentum in 2007 and developed into a full-blown financial meltdown(2008) and a worldwide recession (2009-), revealed a highly volatile and fragilesystem operating beneath the surface images of solid economic growth and societalprosperity. The near collapse of the current economic order came as a surprise to themost of the economics scholars (Harvey, 2010), which subsequently prompted seriousdiscussions about the relevance and accuracy of the mainstream economics indescribing the workings of the contemporary globalized capitalism (Stiglitz, 2010).As it happens, it was a dispersed group of non-conformist social scientists andbusiness scholars that over the years made the most consistent effort in trying tounderstand the explosiveness of the current economic model, not the normal scienceeconomics (e.g. Epstein, 2005; Harvey, 2005).

Among these rebel voices were US Marxists Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweeney, whotime and again reminded the wider audience about the fragility of the contemporaryeconomic setup (Foster & Magdoff, 2009). Their basic argument, made popularalready in the classic book Monopoly Capital (Baran & Sweezy, 1966), asserts thatthe structures of modern capitalism tend to produce stagnating economies as a result

of their tendency to extract excessive profits from business companies that over timehave a propensity to leave the employee class increasingly deprived. The monopolycapitalists, i.e. corporate owners, managers and investors, pursue ever higher returnsto their invested capital by paying less for the workers and selling with relatively highprice. The outcome is a deprived employee whose diminished purchasing powercombined with the maturation of industrial development ultimately slows down theeconomic growth in many Western countries. In this context, the so calledfinancialization of the economy (i.e. the expansion of the financial markets) can beregarded as a compensatory mechanism that helps to artificially boost the economy


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under the conditions of monopoly-capitalism (Foster & Magdoff, 2009). However, inthe longer run financialization is likely to fuel the underlying fragilities andinstabilities of the system instead of altering the basic dynamics of the monopolycapitalist economies.

Unlike the view of Harry Bravermans (1974) labour process theory, heavily

influenced by Barans and Sweeneys (1966) monopoly-capital theory (Rowlinson &Hassard, 2001), current day form of capitalism could be described as a culture ofconsumer-employees where the worldwide deterioration of the employmentconditions is in many places compensated by the opportunities provided for differenttypes of consumptionist activities as the dominant form of life (du Gay, 1996). Withthe help of the availability of flexible loans and mortgages, individuals have becomeseemingly independent of their status as salaried employees. However, as the recentcrisis has demonstrated, the propping up of employee wealth through financialleverage cannot forever hide the underlying weakening of the power position of laborrelative to the dominance of the globalized capital and related factors of production.Financial expansion tends to lead to speculative bubbles, which sooner or later burst, leaving in many cases the regular citizens and employee to pay the bills in the

form of rising unemployment and other economic hardship. The development of aconsumptionist economy can be viewed as being connected to the gradualdeterioration of the employment conditions.

The picture painted by Foster, Magdoff, Harvey and other critical (neo-Marxist)thinkers could be taken as a timely reminder to IHRM and other business disciplinesabout the systemic irrationalities and pathologies of late modern capitalism. IHRMand related fields of inquiry tend to take the prevailing economic theories andideologies for granted as they discuss the effects of the societal and economiccontexts on multinational corporations, organizational practices and labor relations.Yet as the current crisis has made clear, global economy leans on an extremely fragilesetup of monopoly-finance capitalism, a major task of which is to prop up thedeclining economy and its workers (Baccaro, 2010). From this perspective, no amountof regulation or stimulus is enough to alter the ultimate structures of asymmetry,inequality and deprivation that lie at the root of the current problems. In a sense, therather unprejudiced conclusions emanating from a neo-Marxist interpretation of thefinancial crisis offer a thoroughgoing intellectual and political challenge to themajority of economics and business scholars (including the academy of IHRM), whoseem to continue to hold on to relatively conventionalist views of society andeconomy in face of more realistic readings of the situation (cf. Rowlinson & Hassard,2001).

Conclusions

The past few years have shown that there is a growing interest towards criticalapproaches to international human resource management. In particular the emergingcritical perspectives on the practice and theory of international management havebeen offering substantial contributions to the advancement of a more reflexive type ofinquiry into cultural differences, multinational corporations and international workingthat are directly applicable to the more specific domain of IHRM research (Jack,Calas, Nkomo and Peltonen, 2008). Yet at the same time one could possibly argue


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that the critical management studies programme, which has been recently orientingtowards discourses, relations and identity (instead of structures of production) hasitself been to some extent disrupted as a result of the global financial and economiccrisis. The crisis that came as a surprise to most economic and business experts hasprompted a re-evaluation of the scholarly theories and political understandings of thecurrent globalized world across the paradigmatic spectrum (e.g. Harvey, 2010; cf.

Currie, Knights and Davies, 2010). As part of this soul-searching, some scholars areturning back to more classic Marxist views in order to craft a more accurate picture ofthe causes and consequences of the financial crisis, and to envision politicalalternatives to global neo-liberalism.

Yet the overall scholarly spirit that hopefully passes from the engagement of thechapter with critical theories is one of openness and creativity. The chapter hassuggested two specific lines of critical inquiry within IHRM (construction of powerrelations in connection to the organization of HRM in MNE subsidiaries, the changingrole of expatriates in the transnational organizations and labor markets), but by doingso, it has in no way intended to ignore other potentially interesting lines of criticalanalyses and interrogations of IHRM. Instead, various critical theoretical approaches

should be understood as illuminating different aspects of the workings of power andideology within international human resource management. Rather than establishingan exclusive programme, it is more fruitful for the advancement of theoreticaldialogues in the field to let critique enter into international HRM research in its manyforms and styles (Alvesson, Bridgman & Willmott, 2009; Adler, Forbes & Willmot,2007). On the other hand, this should not be taken as a suggestion of bypassing thefact that corporate organizations often function as loci of capitalist exploitation andsocietal inequality, or, of shying away from the idea that the role of a critical scholaris also to persistently ask: what is it that we propose to do today? (Fromm, 1997; 57,cited in Hassard, Hogan & Rowlinson, 2001; 357).

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