Examining the Contemporary Worker and the Workplace From a Leadership-as-Practice Perspective: A HRD Opportunity

Raelin, Joseph A. Article — Published Version Examining the Contemporary Worker and the Workplace From a Leadership-as-Practice Perspective: A HRD Opportunity Human Resource Development Review Suggested Citation: Raelin, Joseph A. (2024) : Examining the Contemporary Worker and the Workplace From a Leadership-as-Practice Perspective: A HRD Opportunity, Human Resource Development Review, ISSN 1534-4843, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, Iss. OnlineFirst, pp. 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1177/15344843241249772 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/294170 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Theory and Conceptual Article Human Resource Development Review 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1–19 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/15344843241249772 journals.sagepub.com/home/hrd Examining the Contemporary Worker and the Workplace From a Leadership-as-Practice Perspective: A HRD Opportunity Joseph A. Raelin 1,2  Abstract In this article the author uses the lens of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) to analyze the concerns of the worker in the contemporary workplace and proposes both new insights and potential remediations through a post-humanistic leadership centered on practice. L-A-P is designed to probe underneath the accepted or “natural”human resource practices to uncover the power dynamics in the workplace that have led to challenges to the worker in the form of burnout, lack of autonomy, and detachment. After introducing the practice approach to the workplace, the paper interrogates the potential value of leadership being viewed as a collaborative agency constituting changes in the trajectory of prefigured work practices that can have affirmative consequences via its ethical and critical approach to human resource development. Keywords Workers and the workplace, leadership-as-practice, organizational change, collective reflexivity, collaborative agency, critical management studies, post-humanism 1 Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT), Finland 2 Lancaster University Management School (LUMS), UK Corresponding Author: Joseph A. Raelin, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT), 53850 Lappeenranta, Finland. Email: [email protected] This essay focuses on the contemporary workplace and its challenges to the worker in the form of burnout, lack of autonomy, and detachment. The author’s position is that the emerging field of “leadership-as-practice”or L-A-P and its unique approach to change is in an ideal place to address and redress this theme from the point of view of both the worker and the manager. L-A-P is a leadership approach that looks for leadership not in individuals but in social processes within a given work setting that can change the trajectory of the flow of ongoing practices or change the turning points in the spaces between workers. The practices in question can be ostensive or embodied and emergent and are shaped by the workers and their collective activities, discourses, space, and artifacts all of which can enhance or detract from what they are attempting to accomplish. So, in L-A-P, to find leadership one must look to the practices in which they are occurring (Raelin, 2023). L-A-P is further committed to probe underneath accepted or “natural”human resource practices to uncover the power dynamics in the workforce that have led to reactions such as “quiet quitting”or resignations that continue to represent expressions of antipathy which have been around for as long as managers have expected workers to stay in their lane of doing and not thinking. Accordingly, this paper purposely uses the word “worker”rather than “employee”to designate, more in a sociological than economic sense, that workers in their relationship to their employer serve with a degree of dependency or vulnerability that without democratic intervention requires the application of protective labor laws (Davidov, 2005). This condition applies regardless whether the workers in question are blue-collar workers or those who serve in knowledge-based or professional capacities. The paper, then, after providing some background on practice theory and, in particular, on leadership-as-practice (L-A-P), offers a unique practice theory-based perspective on the state of the worker in the contemporary workplace and how management can improve worker well-being through a collective form of human resource development (hereafter HRD). In particular, as will be articulated in the paper, the practice view gives workers the chance to develop dynamic emerging relationships through collective reflexivity, which in turn can produce a leadership in the flow of practice. Further, the practice in question can be one of co-development in which workers, through critical dialogue, begin to question, learn from, and collaborate with one another. Leadership of this nature can be particularly relevant in our increasingly digitalized workplaces in which there is a premium on improvisation in response to unexpected demands and crises. In the pages to follow, the paper’s contribution to the theme will be divided into five specific sub-themes: practice as a frame of reference for the workplace, the collective nature of work, the focus on change in leadership-as-practice, its approach to ethics and critical management studies, and finally L-A-P’s post-humanistic treatment of the worker. The aim, in sum, is to provide an alternative lens to view the condition of the worker and consider ways to improve their work conditions through a post-humanistic leadership centered on practice. 2Human Resource Development Review 0(0) Background Let’s begin by theorizing our conception of practice and how it can assist human resource development practitioners in understanding the situational dynamics occurring in the workplace and how they may be changed. First, in referring to practice, we are not using the term in the sense of a rehearsal or as a classifier of particular contextual activities, such as a professional practice or a teaching or yoga practice (Reich & Hager, 2014). Rather, guided by what is often referred to as the “practice turn”in social theory, practice is viewed as a social activity that is constituted by shared practices that actors incorporate to shape and interpret their own and others’subsequent actions (Bourdieu, 1977;Giddens, 1984). These practices, furthermore, represent a coordinated nexus of doings and sayings governing conduct within a particular context (Schatzki, 1996). Materiality, constituting non-human objects and artifacts, also plays a critical role and is no longer just the backdrop of consequential actions. Accordingly, practice is not equivalent merely to what people do but in its strong form is constituted of activities that have meaning-making, identity-forming, and order-producing characteristics (Chia & Holt, 2006;Nicolini, 2009). What does it take, then, to establish a practice? In their work on the construction of a management team, Bjørkeng et al. (2009) found three essential mechanisms: ·Authoring boundaries –referring to processes by which activities are constructed as a legitimate part of practicing (or not) ·Negotiating competencies –referring to what it takes to perform as a competent practitioner ·Adapting materiality –signifying the devices by which material configurations are enacted and entangled in practicing and constructed as essential elements of (a) practice These mechanisms begin with the workers deciding by their statements or actions that particular activities are accepted as part of the practice, although variations may amend the conventional trajectories, such as when a team may decide whether to hear final objections to decisions that seem to have already been made. The same can be said for skills and competencies deemed essential to the practice along with new knowledge needed to supplement heretofore established capabilities. The introduction of new knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA’s) typically falls within the function of HRD as organizations will need to rely on workers to incorporate new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into the work flow (Mehdiabadi & Li, 2016). Accordingly, HRD practitioners would need to ensure the inclusion of such meta-competencies as skilled improvement or agility into their repertoire (Veisi et al., 2019). Finally, there needs to be acknowledgement of the contribution of particular tools and material, such as whether to introduce models or prototypes to test performance prior to launch. A case example of the aforementioned dynamics was reported by Spillane and associates (Spillane et al., 2001) among elementary school science teachers who Raelin 3 exhibited leadership through their practices within their school organization. The example displays in particular the contribution of stakeholder coordination, expertise, material resources, and disciplinary reform to the change in teachers’practices. The case initially reflected the initiative of one of the new teachers, Steve, who had advanced knowledge of curriculum development and science education practices. He and his colleagues and external contacts introduced new methods using science fairs and project-based instruction. In particular, they challenged the “transmission model of instruction”in favor of methods emphasizing the “construction of knowledge”(p. 935). School discussions about one of the science fairs illustrated how it served as a framing artifact for some novel instructional efforts: The first-grade teachers decided on a series of experiments that would introduce children to science as a methodological investigation of the world, then shift to the different domains in which science applies so that when the students reached fourth grade, they would be familiar with the processes of scientific investigation. As first grade teacher Irene explained: “We at first decided to simplify it for parents. But then we decided, wait a minute - what we need to do is model for the kids, model the experiments. We still don’t have it right, but we need to model the scientific method and have the kids go home and try out the experiments”(p. 938). Practice as a Frame of Reference for the Workplace Having established the value of practice to understand work dynamics, it can be a key concept for signifying how workers can achieve active being-in-the-world. While some of these practices may be dispersed, there are many that are germane to particular occupations and professions. Each practice consists of work interactions shaped by histories of shared and contested meaning subject to ongoing engagement and negotiation by workers (Okhuysen et al., 2013). They will engage with one another using epistemic, social, and embodied modalities to determine how the given practice will be organized. In so doing, the practice will in turn affect the identities, positions, knowledge, and communication of the participants. Further, these practices occur at particular times and in particular spaces and are most often construed as part of a nexus of entwined activities which relate to each other and are linked through what Schatzki (2002) refers to as understandings, rules, and teleoaffective structures (p. 80). When it comes to issues of time and duration, we know that workplace practices are transformed over time as are the goals and standards of performance. Consequently, workers need to renegotiate and reposition themselves in work practices throughout their working lives. Their participation needs to be enduring in order that they remain current. As a result, Billett (2002) concludes that the workers’changing competences, among other attributes, shape their “life direction and the kinds of interactions that they engage in”(p. 468). The confluence of space and social interaction can also have significant practice effects on the worker and the workplace. In particular, the nature of any social discourse can be shaped by the spatial configuration of the sites in which interactions take place. 4Human Resource Development Review 0(0) For example, integrated offices tend to have more unplanned conversations and more interaction across teams (Penn et al., 1999;Sailer et al., 2012). Movement within the workplace can be also encouraged by attractors, defined as facilities such as kitchens that are known to personalize the space by attracting further exchange (Kabo et al., 2015). The spatial configuration of a work setting can also have effects on creativity and innovation, and for our purposes here, it is also known to shape interactions that can either enhance or restrict change (Siebert et al., 2017). The Collective Nature of Work and Learning Besides contributing to our understanding of movement and space in the workplace, the practice perspective also points to the collective nature of a good deal of work activity. Knowledge work in our contemporary workplace often requires collaboration. Gherardi (2008) considers such work as “a collective bricolage enacted by those participating in a practice, mobilizing resources, using instruments, and employing a contingent and goal-directed rationality”(p. 523). Schatzki (2012) further points out that practice represents an organized constellation of different people’s activities and thus must be understood as an intersubjective experience anchored in the activities of multiple people, and not as the action of an individual. The phenomenologist Alfred Schütz (1967) argued that no practice can be understood outside its intersubjectively created meaning and motive, both of which are thus socially constructed. Hence, practices take place at a social site, which can be thought of as a place where coexistence transpires through bundles of activities and arrangements. Workers need to rely upon their colleagues to develop their occupational identity, solidarity, and understanding about what it takes to be successful (Lloyd, 2009). From the HRD field, we can attest that learning in the workplace also has a collective dimension that is different from and perhaps greater than the sum of workers’individual learning. It depicts learning at the collective level suggesting that systems can learn independently of the individuals who occupy them (Shipton, 2006). Among the multilevel ways collective learning has been characterized are: (1) as a facilitator of the learning of its constituents, (2) as a mediator focusing on shared mental models and collective processes, (3) as a means of achieving the strategic renewal of an organization, and (4) as a link to improve the practices of the actors, such as customers and suppliers, within a network of organizations (Garavan & McCarthy, 2008;Korin & Liikamaa, 2023). The collective learning process is thus bound up with collective practice. Participants learn not from a transfer of knowledge within a confined space but from a contested interaction among fellow inquirers who find a way to share their ideas and interpretations in the midst of dynamic unfolding activity. It derives from an epistemology of practice that appreciates the process of learning in the midst of action itself with one’s fellow learners (McCormack et al., 2013;Raelin, 2007). Raelin 5 Labor process theory would point out that workplace regimes featuring a high degree of division of labor, repetitive tasks, managerial control, and lack of voice would nullify the opportunity for independent exercise of skill, learning, and expression of identity (Thompson & Vincent, 2010). On the other hand, invoking a subjective critical realist position, Laaser and Karlsson (2022) point out that workers are collective agents and possess what Archer refers to as “degrees of freedom”to determine their own course of action (Archer, 2003, p. 7). Their practices, consequently, are guided by positive impulses to create independent spaces in which they can develop their identities, shape their own rules and values, and guide how they relate to and learn with one another (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999). A question remains, however, whether managerial control in particular spaces become totalizing to such an extent as to threaten workers’security, integrity, and autonomy. The response of workers to threatening forms of control has been found to be diverse, ranging from compliance to covert and, ultimately, overt forms of resistance. For example, to maintain their identities, they may collectively display a gesture of compliance while deploying such tactics as cynicism, irony, foot dragging, boredom, staged performance, or reinvention of meaning (Fleming & Spicer, 2008;Noury et al., 2022;Siltaloppi et al., 2022;Ybema & Horvers, 2017). Ultimately, any movement towards the practices entailed in resistance appears to arise from contradictions between the attempts by management to define an organizational identity and the corresponding response of workers who maintain their own sense of personal and collective meaning. It may useful to pause here to say more about the nature of the intersubjective relation between workers. The negotiation in practice between individuals, with all of their life experiences and the immediate social experience, constitutes a relation that Billett (2008) refers to as a relational interdependence. Since workers can incorporate or ignore the suggestions of others, individual agency cannot be reducible to social agency. Indeed, the workplace interdependence between parties is often disjointed and inconsistent. Beckett (2013) refers to the give-and-take of the workplace as a “complex manifestation of emergence”that is neither predictable nor reducible. It is a form that we might call an “intra-action”(Barad, 2003), in which the conversation is not between separate, self-contained entities but as a dynamic emerging relation shaped by the parties in response to each other, to their artifacts, and to their surroundings. In this albeit uneven and unpredictable way, practices can be transformed and remade (Nicolini, 2012). A good example of an interdependent practice is the case of large-scale software development, which often requires dealing with uncertainty and communication and coordination breakdowns. Team members can be involved in writing code over many months, and it is often impossible to specify designs entirely in advance and yet the ultimate product must mesh perfectly. Techniques and artifacts, such as modularization of code, integration plans, component interface specifications, and documentation, help manage interdependence but developers also need to use informal communication channels to address seeming intractable issues that crop up (Cramton & Webber, 2005). According to Herbsleb and Grinter (1999,p.86),“what appear to be casual 6Human Resource Development Review 0(0) conversations around the water cooler serve to informally exchange (critical) information and experience…Informal communication fills in the details of work, handles exceptions, corrects mistakes, and manages ripple effects of previous decisions.” The Focus on Change in L-A-P As was pointed out at the outset, a key discriminating element in L-A-P is its focus on change in the trajectory of a collective practice. It considers and seeks to improve human resource sustainability –and ultimately organizational effectiveness –through the collective voices and actions of the worker. Compared to individualistic accounts of leadership focusing on entities (i.e., leaders), the ontological emphasis in L-A-P resides within the processes of interaction between actors and between them and their material accompaniments. Those who are working on an endeavor collectively are participants or collaborators whose mutual activities may or may not change a turning point in participants’shared knowhow, thus leadership may or may not ensue (Simpson, 2016). When it does change a turning point, which in turn may also precipitate a change in the trajectory in the flow of a given practice, it can be said that leadership has occurred by the inter-connected parties who have come together to accomplish a mutual endeavor. What we do know is that as workers engage and learn with one another, they commit to reflecting on their own actions and consequently learn to reconstruct them according to their mutual interests. This public form of reflection has the potential not only to create new knowledge but to open up space for innovative ways to accomplish work, or even to reconceive how the work is done in the first place. Practitioners gradually become “co-subjective,”suggesting a penchant to momentarily separate from themselves (Spiegelberg, 1975;Tsoukas, 2009). They begin to recognize their limitations or the limitations of the “natural attitude,”which in phenomenology refers to a habitual way of reacting to phenomena (Luft, 2002). By opening themselves up to how others see the same phenomena from diverse perspectives, they can occasionally overturn the habitus (Bourdieu’s way of referring to how we are predisposed to view the world) that they inherit (Bourdieu, 1977). The essential element in change is leadership itself, for without it, the flow of practice would continue as is without a change in trajectory, conditioned by a range of institutional forces and the habitus. Even with leadership, however, there is no guarantee of instrumental outcomes. Agency simply produces movement and even if changes are produced by leadership, they are not necessarily for the better. However, as long as there is collective reflection within the operating group, there is every chance that the re-direction and re-orientation will be of value to those participating. Simpson (2016) refers to this form of leadership as a trans-actional agency, an in-the-moment metaphoric wave resulting in a combined agency or a co-action. At any moment, anyone can contribute to the flow. Some add more by virtue of their experience. Others’ contributions may be intermittent. These trans-actions are saturated in power, but in a way that shapes movement rather than as a property of discrete entities. Raelin 7 An example of this form of leadership was reported by Zerjav and associates (Zerjav et al., 2014) in the collaborative design of projects in architecture, engineering, and construction. By analyzing the interaction dynamics, transition patterns, and knowledge-brokering activities of the workers involved in the operation of a medical imaging center, the authors found that leadership evolved as a blend of materialdiscursive practices across multiple domains of expertise. In particular, they found several factors that contributed to the emergence of leadership: domain knowledge ownership, frequency of interactions, actor responsiveness, and cross-disciplinary knowledge brokering. The findings reinforced the idea, in the authors’own words, that “leadership can and should be viewed as an opportunity, a situational and emergent interactive phenomenon rather than an inherent characteristic of invariably charismatic individuals and their supposedly heroic achievements”(p. 219). L-A-P’s Approach to Ethics and Critical Management Studies So far, the paper has focused on social interactions over individualistic accounts of action in part because of the so-called flat ontology of L-A-P, in which humans as individuals are not accorded preordinate responsibility for agency (Raelin & Robinson, 2022). In addition, Mensch and Barge (2019) have noted that L-A-P seems to eschew any form of universal moral authority and even the discovery of a teleological reality. The response from L-A-P writers has been that L-A-P engages in confrontation with moral practices, seeking to deeply explore them from a collective and concurrent reflection-in-action. Further, its genealogical roots suggest an ethics that is coconstructed and negotiated in the flow of practice arising from a base that recognizes an innate capacity for ethical agency unimpeded by rules and sustained by a profound respect for others and a commitment to one’s community (Raelin & Robinson, 2022). L-A-P thus relies upon a principled pragmatism rather than a set of universal principles to guide people in their ethical decision-making (Friedrichs & Kratochwil, 2009). Unlike directive models of leadership, L-A-P cannot be based on a philosophy of dependence in which followers, without discretion, follow the “right”leader who is assumed to be the fount of moral rectitude. Rather L-A-P observes a philosophy of codevelopment in which workers can discover and unfold from within themselves (Woods, 2016) and, then, intersubjectively with others. They engage in critical dialogue to question and learn from one another. Even in mundane and everyday practices, a commitment to the dignity of others can produce a shift, as Grandy and ´ Sliwa (2017, p. 427) phrase it, from a focus on leadership ethics as a “project on oneself to a project in relation to and for others.”Ultimately, although L-A-P often operates under conditions of soft power in which internal debates proceed as a contest to decide who has the right to orchestrate or “author”one’s interest, it can also intervene in conditions of hard power. Hard power looms when particular forces seek to deprive impacted groups (via gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and the like) of their participation and even survival in social systems (Raelin, 2023). L-A-P’s response to these conditions can be 8Human Resource Development Review 0(0) Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10. 1086/345321 Barratt, E. (2002). 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