Kavanagh, Donncha

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Organization Management Journal Volume 11 Issue 4 Article 10 10-3-2014 Doing and Undoing HRM in Sri Lanka Donncha Kavanagh University College Dublin Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/omj  Part of the Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons, and the Organizational Communication Commons Recommended Citation Kavanagh, Donncha (2014) "Doing and Undoing HRM in Sri Lanka," Organization Management Journal: Vol. 11: Iss. 4, Article 10. Available at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/omj/vol11/iss4/10 Organization Management Journal, 11: 288, 2014Copyright © Eastern Academy of ManagementISSN: 1541-6518 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15416518.2014.978718EMERGING CONCEPTUAL SCHOLARSHIPDoing and Undoing HRM in Sri LankaDonncha Kavanagh1Co-Editor1UCD School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, IrelandIn his article “HRM as a ‘Web of Texts’: (Re)Articulatingthe Identity of HRM in Sri Lanka’s Localized Global ApparelIndustry,” Dhammika Jayawardena presents a rare and fasci-nating insight into what human resource management (HRM)looks like on a factory floor in the Global South. HRM is a set ofpractices, a language, and an ideological position that emergedfar from this context, so its translation and adoption into thissetting are interesting from both a practical and a theoreticalperspective. Jayawardena’s approach is to focus on HRM as alanguage, and to trace how this language came to simultane-ously confront, supplant, and incorporate an earlier language ofpersonnel management that was also situated and grounded in aparticular time and place.In and of itself, Sri Lanka’s apparel industry warrants studyfor a host of reasons. It employs more than 300,000 people,mainly young women who have migrated from rural areas. Thislevel of migration has created its own difficulties and there isevidence that these women were often badly treated in the past.The industry is huge, employing 15% of the country’s work-force and accounting for half of its exports, and is entwinedin a wide network of global capital, instantiated in the phys-ical entwining of the female workers with Japanese sewingmachines through which they become invisible and unheard.One contribution of this article is that through careful field-work and analysis the author gives these workers—who mightproperly be considered subalterns in Spivak’s (1988) under-standing of the term—a voice, albeit with the author as inter-locutor. Central to Jayawardena’s analysis is the notion thatthe workers’ identity is framed within the patronizing termlamai—broadly meaning “little ones”—and much of his studyexplores how this identity persists and is reframed withinwider discourses of personnel management, HRM, and feministAddress correspondence to Donncha Kavanagh, UCD Schoolof Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. E-mail:donncha.kavanagh@ucd.ieactivism. His study indicates that “personnel management”as practiced in Sri Lanka’s apparel industry during the early1980s was characterized by physical punishments and inhumanwork practices, which were not part of Western understand-ings of the term. He documents how, after the late 1980s,HRM was adopted and translated into this context in a complexstory where different actors often had contradictory expecta-tions. For him, “doing HRM” describes the officially endorsedway of managing labor in the apparel industry, as exemplifiedby the written texts in the English language, while “undo-ing HRM” is embedded and embodied in a multiplicity ofnative social discourses and narratives, most often transmit-ted orally in the Sinhala language. In the tradition of subalternstudies, Jayawardena’s contribution is to articulate this secondset of texts and voices that draw on much longer traditionsand that often implicitly and explicitly violate the core normsof “doing” HRM. His study explores how both “doing” and“undoing” HRM are implicated in one another in this con-text, and he skillfully uses ideas from poststructuralism toshow how linguistic categories and texts from different dis-courses come to be substituted for one another. Distancinghimself from fashionable distinctions between rhetoric andreality, Jayawardena presents a more subtle story of textualinterminglement through which the language and meaningof HRM is continually reconfigured in a dynamic web oftexts.REFERENCESpivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L.Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313).Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. (Original work published1985)288

Doing and Undoing HRM in Sri Lanka

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Doing and Undoing HRM in Sri Lanka

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