ABSTRACT
Social practice wisdom is about how people engage in everyday activities like work. Thus, as a site for wisdom research, Human Resource Management (HRM) provides fertile ground. There are many challenges to doing such research, as indeed, there are to achieve wise HRM practice. It is not surprising then that in this chapter we raise more questions than answers. The very term Human Resource Management sets up the organizational work force as an economic component of the production process of that organization: capital and labor produce an output. Yet work is much more than an economic process, important as this is. It is a vital source of our humanity because we must work to live. This unempathetic commodifi cation of workers is antithetical to a wisdom-based view of the work force and workplace. The workplace is for many also the most important social site of human relationships outside of their family (Kram and Isabella 1985; Rawlins 1992), and, for some, the workplace is their family. Work also helps to shape our identity even if we feel that our work does not express who we truly are as human beings (Casey 1995; Alvesson and Willmott 2002; Scheeres and Rhodes 2006). During the 1980s and 1990s, when the narrow economic view of work was arguably strongest, epitomized by Al ‘Chainsaw’ Dunlap who shamefully became a corporate hero by sacking huge numbers of people, organizations downsized hoping to get more work out of fewer people. For many people work is the biggest source of stress in their lives (Farrell and Geist-Martin 2005). The literature now also talks of social (Farrell and Geist-Martin 2005) and spiritual health in the workplace (Leigh 1997; Vos and Barker 2007), while some organizations incorporate a healthy, wealthy, and wise program as part of a holistic HR package. So how can HRM contribute to organizational and managerial wisdom and what features of wisdom and work should HRM consider? To answer these questions we consider a number of factors including age, HRM theory, knowledge, and experience. The chapter fi nishes by providing seven important HRM questions that both researchers and practitioners need to answer.
