Human Resource Management in Education

Contexts, Themes and Impact

Justine Mercer, Bernard Barker, Richard Bird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136964985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The study of educational leadership makes little sense unless it is in relation to who the leaders are, how they are leading, what is being led, and with what effect. Based on the premise that learning is at the heart of leadership and that leaders themselves should be learners, the Leadership for Learning series explores the connections between educational leadership, policy, curriculum, human resources and accountability. Each book in the series approaches its subject matter through a three-fold structure of process, themes and impact.

Series Editors - Clive Dimmock, Mark Brundrett and Les Bell

The effects of globalization are evident in education policy around the world. Governments from the United States to China are driving their education systems to produce more skilled, more flexible, more adaptable employees. The pressure to perform is all-pervasive, meaning present-day leaders have to go beyond the principles of humane and equitable management practice and look for a competitive advantage through strategies that enhance motivation, build capacity for organizational improvement, and produce better value-added performance.

Human Resource Management in Education debates the fundamental question of how far effective human resource management policies can enable schools and colleges to transcend the paradoxes of the global reform agenda. It analyses the relationship between leadership, the classroom and results, and uses case studies to explore the extent to which performance is enhanced by distributed leadership and constrained by social, political and economic contexts.

The book is divided into three parts:

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• examining the current context of human resource management, by critically analysing globalization, human capital theory, and worldwide trends in government legislation, societal values, and teacher culture(s);

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• exploring two pairs of contemporary themes in human resource management, by comparing the roles of leaders and followers, on the one hand, and contrasting learning and greedy organizations, on the other;

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• looking at how the context and the themes impact on particular contemporary practices in human resource management, by analysing the selection and development of professionals, the remodelling of school teams and the management of performance.

The authors carefully blend advocacy with evidence to ensure relevance for both practitioner and academic audiences across the globe. The book would be of particular use to students on masters courses in educational leadership.

Part I
The current context of human resource management

1
Introduction

Globalization, human capital theory and human resource management

Introduction

This book provides an holistic, research-based overview of the core ideas and key debates in human resource management (HRM) within the education sector. It has been written to help practitioners, students and academics develop an appropriate conceptual framework within which to situate their own research and investigations. To this end, rather than simply reviewing the existing literature, it blends advocacy and evidence to offer readers a clearly articulated critical stance. It challenges the normative best-practice paradigm that dominates the field of HRM in education, and in its place develops a consistent alternative perspective that takes full account of recent national and international trends.

The book argues that previous models of HRM are inadequate to address the issues educational leaders currently face. Whereas leaders in the past were able to gain support and satisfy stakeholders simply by treating people well, today’s leaders have to go beyond the principles of humane and equitable management practices because of very significant global shifts in economic patterns, government education policies, societal values and teaching cultures. To succeed in the twenty-first century, educational leaders need a thorough understanding of these global shifts and their implications. That in itself is not enough, however. Twenty-first-century educational leaders also need to view these trends and policies through a critical lens, constantly questioning the assumptions being made and interrogating the evidence being offered. Only then will they be able to ameliorate the worst excesses of a market-driven education system obsessed with spurious standards, and realize the full potential of education. The primary purpose of this book is to provide readers with just such a critical lens.

What is HRM?

Before we develop the argument introduced above, it is necessary to define some key concepts and to outline some key historical trends. The term human resource management emerged in the late 1980s as an alternative to personnel management. It was intended to convey ‘a broader, strategic and more dynamic interpretation of the role of effective staff management in organisations’ (Middlewood and Lumby 1998: 9). Personnel management was typically the remit of a separate, specialist, expensive and highly bureaucratic unit within the organization. It was predominantly concerned with operational procedures, and too often offered line managers only belated, unrealistic solutions. By contrast, HRM reflected the strategic vision of the organization and was fully integrated into its day-to-day management. In theory, at least, it allowed managers at all levels to provide customized individual responses to issues, to use positive motivation rather than negative control, to be proactive rather than reactive, and to resolve differences through purposeful negotiation without recourse to an external third party (Middlewood and Lumby 1998).

Initially, HRM was thought by some to be just a passing fad – ‘a fragile plant’ (Storey 1995). However, it caught the zeitgeist, and hundreds of books and articles have since been written on the subject, and a plethora of claims made about HRM’s impact (or lack thereof). Because staff salaries generally account for the largest proportion of an organization’s overall costs, consuming as much as 80 per cent of a school’s budget (Ironside et al. 1997), it is not surprising that attention has become focused on how to get the best, and the most, out of employees. Storey, a professor of HRM within the Open University Business School, suggests that ‘human resource management is a distinctive approach to employment management that seeks to achieve competitive advantage through the strategic deployment of a highly committed and capable workforce, using an array of cultural, structural and personnel techniques’ (1995: 5). Authors within the field of education have shied away from such business-oriented notions as competitive advantage, preferring more nebulous terms like effectiveness, success or optimal performance. Thus, for example, Middlewood and Lumby (1998: 5) claim that ‘effective human resource management is the key to the provision of high quality educational experiences’ and that ‘educational organizations depend for their success on the quality, commitment and performance of people who work there’ (italics added).

Substituting ‘the provision of high quality educational experiences’ for ‘competitive advantage’ is an important first step in distinguishing HRM in education from HRM in business. However, as we shall see, much greater differentiation is needed if people working within education are to meet the enormous challenges being generated by human capital theory, neoliberalism, managerialism and performativity.

Four key concepts

The terms human capital theory, neo-liberalism, managerialism and performativity are used widely in the literature but rarely explained, perhaps because they are not easy to define, and different authors use them to mean subtly different things. Below we offer a brief and undeniably superficial explanation of each term. Readers are invited to consult the material we cite if they would like a fuller and more nuanced exposition.

Human capital theory

Economists call the resources available to individuals and groups capital. Physical capital is produced when raw materials are converted into saleable goods. Human capital is produced when people acquire desired skills and/or knowledge (Bell and Stevenson 2006). Human capital theory assumes that individuals are motivated to increase their human capital by obtaining relevant qualifications and experience, because this will most likely increase their future earnings. It also assumes that national governments are motivated to increase the collective human capital of their citizenry, because this will most likely increase their competitiveness and global reach. Human capital theory, therefore, contends that the primary purpose of education must be to enhance productivity and support economic growth.

Although this theory has exerted a powerful influence over education policy since the 1960s (Demeulemeester and Diebolt 2005), it has several severe limitations (Bell and Stevenson 2006). First, empirical studies suggest that higher spending on education (either by individuals or by nation-states) does not necessarily create greater wealth. In fact, ‘human capital returns are decreasing and knowledge produced by education cannot be the engine of self-maintained economic growth’ (Monteils 2004: 103).

Second, in a free market, students cannot be compelled to learn what the economy is thought to need. Would-be drama teachers cannot be forced to take physics degrees, just because a country lacks sufficient scientists.

Third, it is hard to predict what knowledge and skills might be needed in 30 or 40 years’ time, meaning that today’s school-leavers can never be fully prepared for tomorrow’s jobs. So, rather than teaching specific skills and knowledge with in-built obsolescence, schools and colleges should be nurturing creativity and a passion for lifelong learning.

Finally, human capital theory ignores the social and moral purposes of education. These might include learning to live ethically and peacefully in a diverse society, and developing a commitment to social justice. For all these reasons, human capital theory is an inadequate driver of education policy, despite being endorsed by politicians and economists the world over.

Neo-liberalism

In essence, neo-liberalism is ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey 2007: 2). At its most simplistic, neo-liberalism proclaims that the market is king. It is thus the state’s responsibility to create markets in all areas of life, and then intervene as little as possible. Accordingly, public services must be privatized, wherever feasible (as happened with the UK utility companies), or else be subjected to an internal market, or quasi-market (as happened with UK education, health and defence).

Since the 1970s, nearly every country in the world, including China, post-apartheid South Africa and the countries of the former Soviet Union, has embraced ‘some version of neo-liberal theory’ (Harvey 2007: 3). It is thus the current hegemonic discourse (Harvey 2007), although, in truth, it is not so much a single, neat, comprehensive and static discourse as an evolving and messy amalgamation of multiple discourses (Popkewitz 2000) – hence the need to write ‘some version of’ in the phrase quoted above. A key outcome of neo-liberalism has been the wholesale reform of the public sector via a generic process and underpinning ideology usually referred to as managerialism.

Managerialism

Managerialism has been a feature of the public sector in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand since the 1980s. The economic crisis of the late 1970s prompted countries to curb government spending and to question the value of a bureau-welfare state (Barker 2009). As a result, the New Right, under Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, introduced a series of public sector reforms given the label New Public Management (NPM). These reforms ‘reshaped the relationship between public and private sectors, professionals and managers, and central and local government. Citizens and clients were recast as consumers, and public service organizations were recast in the image of the business world’ (Clarke et al. 2000: 45). ‘The organizational forms, technologies, management practices and values’ (Deem 1998: 47) of the private, for-profit business sector were applied to the public sector in an attempt to make it more efficient. According to Clarke and Newman (1997), New Public Management is characterized by:

• a sharp focus on income generation and efficiency to compensate for reduced public spending;

• a preoccupation with quantifiable targets and outcomes rather than intrinsic and more nebulous processes;

• the adoption of new technologies that facilitate more intense monitoring and measurement, thus invading personal life and space with work demands;

• an emphasis on competition between individuals and organizations that leads to spurious choices and increased stress.

Underlying NPM is a particular ideology (Enteman 1993; Pollitt 1993; Trowler 1998; Peters et al. 2000; Deem and Brehony 2005) summarized in the claim that the public sector traditionally wasted resources because it lacked the discipline of the market and allowed its employees too much autonomy (Clarke and Newman 1997).

Even when political parties of the New Left succeeded those of the New Right, the reforms introduced under NPM were extended rather than reversed, for two reasons. First, no government was keen to increase public spending; and second, left-wing politicians saw how the reforms initiated by their right-wing opponents to improve efficiency could also reduce welfare dependency and make professional public servants more responsive to their clients’ needs (Flynn 1999; Clarke et al. 2000). So, when Tony Blair replaced Margaret Thatcher as UK prime minister in 1997, the Labour leader continued to focus on increasing public sector accountability, reducing expenditure, improving efficiency and seeking business solutions to social problems (Clarke et al. 2000). However, he combined Thatcher’s market managerialism with greater central control, introducing a hybrid, modernizing version of NPM (Barker 2009) sometimes referred to as new managerialism. This is different from NPM in three ways.

First, it seeks to produce longer-term effectiveness as well as shorter-term efficiency. Second, it aims not just to reform institutions, but to achieve Labour’s wider political agenda in relation to education, social inclusion and welfare. Finally, it focuses less on cut-throat competition and more on collaboration, stakeholder partnerships and engagement with the wider community (Clarke et al. 2000).

While supporters of new managerialism claim that public sector agencies have been granted greater autonomy, opponents suggest they are being covertly manipulated by a policy context predicated on prescription, inspection and performativity (see below). In other words, ‘Direct central regulation is reduced, but the centre determines the rules of the game, the forms and limits of what can be achieved, so that the system/institution is steered by remote control’ (Marginson 1997: 65). The threat of a merely ‘satisfactiory’ inspection report or a ‘below average’ ranking in the league tables is enough to ensure compliance.

Although the underlying ideology remains the same, managerialism has been enacted differently in different public sectors. The trends in healthcare or policing, for example, are not identical to the trends in education (Clarke and Newman 1997). Moreover, even within education, different sub-sectors (primary, secondary, further education or higher education) have been differently affected (Simkins 2000). For instance, efficiency-related funding cuts have had a much greater impact on UK FE colleges than on UK schools, whereas external inspection has had a much greater impact on schools than on universities.

Performativity

The term performativity was first coined in 1984 by Lyotard, who suggested that the postmodern society had become obsessed with efficiency and effectiveness. The principle of performativity, according to Lyotard (1984), means minimizing inputs (costs) ...

Table of contents

• Leadership for Learning Series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I The current context of human resource management
• Part II Contemporary themes in human resource management
• Part III Contemporary practices in human resource management
• References
• Index