Human Resource Development should aim to make closed contexts more open:A meta reaction to Wang and Doty, Russ-Eft, and Yoon

In this meta reaction paper, I reflect on the initial paper by Wang and Doty (2022a), the two responses (Russ-Eft, 2022; Yoon, 2022), and the final response-to-respondents (Wang & Doty, 2022b). I focus on two observations that stood out for me, encompassing: (1) how HRD is defined; (2) what HRD should contribute to and to what extent the initial authors’ theorizing of HRD is actually “emancipatory.” First, I conclude that Wang and Doty’s systems perspective leaves little room for the individual agency and legitimate interests that various stakeholders have around the ways in which employee learning is organized. Connected with this, their treatment of “the mainstream HRD literature” is not convincing, which limits the rationale for and contribution of their own theorizing efforts. Second, I conclude that Wang and Doty’s work violates the ethical core of HRD and, moreover, falls short of being about “emancipatory theorizing” as they claim

Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: the social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests

This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11,556 tweets, 222 videos, and 3,338 photos, the article assesses user participation in social media protest reporting, as well as the resulting protest accounts. The findings suggest that social media did not facilitate the crowd-sourcing of alternative reporting, except to some extent for Twitter. As with many previous alternative journalistic efforts, reporting was dominated by a relatively small number of users. In turn, the resulting account itself had a strong event-oriented focus, mirroring often-criticized mainstream protest reporting practices