A U S T R A L I A N
U N I V E R S I T I E S ’
R E V I E W
Letter to the Editor Dear Editor, Thanks to Paul Rodan for his thoughtful comments on my review of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (AUR, 62(2), p. 2). Sadly, unexpectedly, and as widely reported in the international press, David Graeber passed away on 2 September 2020. I agree wholeheartedly with Graeber’s book and Paul Rodan’s comments, particularly on the issue of human resource management (HRM) that falls into Graeber’s category of being ‘bullshit’. Just three items might be mentioned in support of this commonly agreed notion: 1. In her 2006 book, Shelley Gare singled out HRM as a particularly good example of what she calls The Triumph of the Airheads (Media21 Publishing). 2. Research by the Tasmanian author Rob Macklin found that one of the most important things for HR managers is to remember the lies they told yesterday (HRM – Ethics and Employment, Oxford); and finally, 3. Perhaps the best illustration of a workplace under HRM remains Schrijvers’s The Way of the Rat (Cyan Books). All three paint a pretty grim picture of HRM, but it is not all bad in the land of HRM. In his book Knowledge and Human Interests (1987), German philosopher Jürgen Habermas developed three knowledgecreating interests which guide not only knowledge and research but also the teaching of HRM. In my 2007 book (Communication & Management at Work), I applied Habermas’ theory to management – and by inference to HRM.
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The vast majority of HRM is dedicated to what Habermas calls an empirical-analytical understanding of work. Here, HRM wants to control workers by using performance management (KPIs, etc.). A minor part of HRM’s teaching and research portfolio is dedicated to an historicalhermeneutical understanding. Mostly, this is what critical management studies (CMS) does (e.g. Klikauer, CMS & Critical Theory, 2015). Finally, there is a truly criticalemancipatory understanding dedicated to ending domination and working towards emancipation. Placed in Graeber’s framework, one might say, HRM’s first approach (control) is bullshit – albeit very dangerous bullshit; the second one (interpretation) is semi-bullshit; while the third one (emancipation) is a worthwhile enterprise. As someone once said, I am a pessimist 80 per cent of the time and an optimist 20 per cent of the time and I live and work for these 20%. One might be inclined to argue that David Graeber, Jürgen Habermas, Paul Rodan, myself and many readers of AUR are working for these 20 per cent and have an interest in ending domination and enabling emancipation. Thomas Klikauer, Western Sydney University
vol. 63, no. 1, 2021
