ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that human resource management (HRM) may be best understood as a discourse and set of practices that attempt to reduce the indeterminacy involved in the employment contract. Reflecting concerns improvement in efficiency that derive from classical management theory, HRM is an organizational mechanism through which goal achievement and survival may be promoted. The concept power-knowledge has two implications. First, by showing how mechanisms of disciplinary power are simultaneously instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge, Michel Foucault challenged positivism's portrayal of them as independent. Second, according to Foucault, rather than being external, or something which operates on something or someone, power is integral or productive in the sense that it creates objects. The employment relationship describes only in general terms services to be provided, allowing details to be elaborated. An underlying presupposition of the dominant neoinstitutionalist approach is that information to determine transaction costs is discovered or uncovered.
