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Title
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Changing the subject: Human resource management in post-socialist workplaces
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:0a61ae611792:11580
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identifier
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12113
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Creator
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Ninkovic, Maja,
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Contributor
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Colette Daiute
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Occupational psychology | Organizational behavior | human resource management | multinational corporations | narrative analysis | post-socialist | subjectivity regulation | workplace
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Abstract
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In the last decade, Serbia has undergone radical changes in its social, political and economic systems. As one of the consequences of these changes, Serbia experienced a significant influx of foreign capital, resulting in an increasing presence of multinational corporations and their local subsidiaries. The purpose of the present study is to explore these new workplaces as sites of emergence of some new social values, i.e., new ways of thinking, feeling, acting and relating to oneself and others in response to the changing socio-historical circumstances (Daiute, Stern, & Lelutiu-Weinberger, 2003), and their role in mediating the processes of 'regulated' subjectivity development of their employees.;In the present study, I foreground the notion of subjectivities as the possible ways of being and understandings of oneself and others (e.g., Weedon, 1987) and theorize individual subjectivity development as the continuous, dynamic and precarious process of negotiation - acceptance, rejection and/or transformation - of the institutional discourses (i.e., set of institutional knowledges and practices) which encode certain values as normative and/or desirable (e.g., Daiute et al, 2003). This socio-cultural and discursive perspective to human development is complemented in the present study with the governmentality approach which highlights the role of institutional practices in 'conducting the conduct' of individuals towards some specific or normative set of values (e.g., Foucault, 1977; Rose, 1989).;The methodological approach and design of the study were informed by these theoretical considerations. The methodology entailed a fine-grained examination of the institutional human resource discourses for the presence of different sets of social values and regulation practices that construe specific normative visions of selves at work. To explore how local HR practitioners engage with power relations embedded in the (global) institutional HR knowledge and practices, I have also conducted semi-structured interviews with local HR professionals. Importantly, the interviews have been designed in such a way as to elicit different social-relational stances (Daiute, 2011), illustrating the dialogical nature of 'selves-in-the-making' as well as the dynamic, context-sensitive and often precarious nature of participants' enactments of institutional values.;As the analyses of the institutional discourses and participants' interviews reveal, the participants' engaged in different patterns of enactments, contestations and transformations of the 'flexible enterprise', a form of subjectivity constructed and regulated as normative in the global institutional discourses of the nine corporations in the sample. The findings indicate that the professional and autobiographical narrating afforded the emergence of perspectives which were predominantly consistent with the institutional values, such as being dynamic, personally responsible and self-regulating, striving for excellence and re-framing work as a means of self-actualization and self-fulfillment. On the other hand, engaging participants in a more 'private' social-relational sphere of friendships allowed for the emergence of more critical engagements with the institutional values.;These complex and dynamic patterns of negotiation of institutional discourses were contingent on both the immediate dialogical context as well as the scope and consistency of local implementation of HR initiatives and the associated 'technologies of governance' (Foucault, 1977; Rose, 1989), as a set of local HR practices aimed at regulating -- directing, channeling or otherwise mobilizing -- individuals' identification with the values and objectives of these multinational corporations. Additionally, the results point to the importance of more distal contexts, such as local practitioners' (lack of) commitments to the discourse of 'flexible enterprise' as HR experts and professionals, as well as citizens of the wider post-socialist transition culture. Finally, in the light of the emergence of participants' perspectives that critically engage with the enterprising values -- such as suppression of individuals' non-work interests (e.g., leisure activities) or identities (e.g., as mothers), over-involvement in work and struggles over moral agency as professionals, the emancipatory rhetoric of global human resource management discourses is questioned.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
