Psychologisation revisited

• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Author: John Godard
• Date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12273

PROVOCATION PAPER

Psychologisation revisited

John Godard

School of Business, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Correspondence

John Godard, School of Business, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Email: john.godard@umanitoba.ca

Troth and Guest would seem in considerable measure to be responding to my 2014 provocation paper, “The

psychologisation of employment relations?”This paper identified a number of shortcomings associated with

psychological research in HRM, but it was mainly about: (a) the takeover of HRM faculty positions and

research by I-O Psychologists, especially in the area of employment relations, and (b) the implications this

could have for how HRM is taught to present and future managers.

Troth and Guest do use quotes from my paper that address these concerns. But the way they do so gives the

impression that it was solely an attack on I-O Psychologists. For example, on page 4, they state that “a particularly

strident accusation of managerialism is Godard's assertion that ‘I-O psychologists are inherently anti-union’and

‘potentially totalitarian’.”What I actually said was: “The problem is not so much that I-O psychologists are inherently

anti-union as that they often have little comprehension of why unions exist, and, more important, why they should

exist”(p. 8, 2014) and that “…the general orientation underlying [psychologisation] is …potentially totalitarian and

repressive….”(p. 7, 2014). Neither of these statements was meant to attack I-O psychologists per se or to “accuse”

anyone of managerialism (a term that I did not even use). Rather, they addressed the possible implications of the psy-

chologisation of employment relations for the teaching and ultimately the practice of HRM. This should be evident

from the context in which both appear, if not from the statements themselves.

The same is true of other quotes Troth and Guest draw from my paper. However, the problem is not so much

that Troth and Guest portray my paper in this way as it is that, in so doing, they never really address the concerns it

raises. The result, which is especially important given the spirit in which I wrote the paper, is that they do little to

advance the debate it was meant to provoke. Perhaps I can do so here.

The main concern in my paper was essentially that the psychologisation of HRM courses and programs, and the

scientism potentially associated with it, could result in HRM becoming the handmaiden for a new corporate order, in

which employees would increasingly be treated as objects, to be subject to advanced systems of discipline and con-

trol, and in which issues of power and conflict—that have long been central to the study of employment relations—

would be completely suppressed.

I have subsequently come to believe (Godard, 2020), even more strongly than stated in my paper (p. 12, 2014),

that the more advanced or “new”HRM practices most associated with psychologisation are just not that widely or

effectively implemented, and that this is in large part because they often just do not work particularly well. Rather

than serving as the handmaiden of a new corporate order, HRM may, as a result, have become a variant of the pro-

verbial emperor with no clothes. This would explain why a function of such economic and social importance seems,

in many workplaces, to have become largely an object of derision.

Received: 21 November 2019 Accepted: 2 December 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12273

84 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj Hum Resour Manag J. 2020;30:84–85.