The End of Personnel? Managing Human Resources in Turbulent Environments

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The End of Personnel? Managing Human Resources in Turbulent Environments

Introduction

Organizations have to cope with an increasingly turbulent environment requiring often rapid adaptation. Combined with the growing pressure from the economic system towards greater efficiency and often identical or at least highly similar technological processes, people become a crucial resource for organizational success. Without adequately qualified and motivated members an organization hardly can cope with these developments. In turn, this makes the management of human resources a crucial task for the management of an organization. In current HRM and management thinking, this is something of a no-brainer and belongs to common wisdom in HRM (see, e.g. Boxall/Purcell/Wright 2007).

However, human resources are different from other resources in a number of ways: they have their own ambitions, they change constantly, they cannot be influenced in a straightforward and simple way, they react in surprising ways to external and internal stimuli, in other words: they are non-trivial machines (von Foerster/Bröcker 2002 ). Linking the behavior of these non-trivial machines to the overall organizational goals is a difficult, yet essential task for successful management In the past, organizations mainly used standard employment to trivialize them, i.e. turn people into personnel with various kinds of capital that can be...

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