An Appreciation of Jerome Joseph

An Appreciation of Jerome Joseph’s Contribution to Human Resource Management

Dr. Jerome Joseph of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad has been writing about numerous industrial relations issues for the past three decades, and among his significant books are Strategic Industrial Relations Management (1990), Transformational Industrial Relations (1995) and Towards an Industrial Relations Theory of Negotiated Connectedness (2004). One of the important concepts that Jerome Joseph has studied is that of alienation. In his words (2004: 99-100), “The most basic insight is the Marxian – alienation as fundamental, alienation as contradictions in all forms and moments of human community … Slave, feudal, capitalist; yesterday, today and tomorrow – contradiction is constant, expression varies. The exploiting and the exploited, the dominating and the dominated, accumulation and exploitation, oligarchy and marginalisation, the elites and masses – are but two sides of the same alienation coin – the alienating and the alienated. Both are in a dehumanised state, both needing conscientisation and liberation, neither exempt from the inhumanity of fundamental contradiction … the only tragedy of human existence is that more often than not consciousness of this condition remains latent and is not manifest even to those submerged in the quagmire of fundamental alienation.”

The principal methodological contributions of Dr. Joseph’s thought can be summarized as follows.  The human in organisations is not a solitary being in search of the notion of an apologetic yearning for salvation within the system of technical control. The human is an autonomous master of the process of technical control in determining the nature of the organisation. The human constructs the organisation. The effectiveness of the meanings made by the human are far greater when the construction of the organisation occurs through a conscious, explicit collective process. Such a conscious, explicit collective process then renders a notion of self reliant action on part of the human. The human does not feel bound to the existential prisons that haunt the character of the organisation. Instead the human is able to transcend these prisons and formulate her existence in the morphology of a collective community that actively presents the situation of dialogue and deliberation. Deliberative dialogue opens up new avenues which prevents rigid status quos from crystallising and attempts to ensure that these status quos will forever remain accountable to the synergy of an ethics which places the discursive argument as a central feature of organisations. These discursive arguments shape the morality of the organisation and vigorously attempt the eradication of the sensibility of domination.

Unlike physical phenomena occurring in nature, social phenomena not only encompass the territory of thoughts and actions, they also include the scheme of silences, which inhabit the non execution of actions, and the non imagination of thoughts. The idea of evolving a critical theory perspective of human resource management is thus a revolutionary project, which will need the evolution of an entire array of conceptual rethinking. Yet such a conceptual rethinking cannot be undertaken in isolation of a sense of community. It will need to be undertaken through the prism of dialogue with those who are willing to reimagine the nature of human resource management. Thus, there is a need for a community of thinkers on human resource management, who are committed to evolving radical thought on the quality of the human person in organisations.

Dr. Srinath Jagannathan

Faculty - HR

FPM (IIM - A)

N L Dalmia Institute of Management Studies and Research