Critical HRD (CHRD) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) – Theory Building and Suggested Methodologies from the Voices of descendants of the African Diaspora

David C. Daniels Northern Illinois University

Critical HRD (CHRD) is recognized as an emerging domain of critique in HRD scholarship and practice, which is itself criticized as being unclearly defined and amorphous. The purpose of CHRD is to challenge existing paradigms regarding the objectives of HRD practice based on discursive interrogation of subordinating systems of organizational and professional knowledge. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a law based ontology which arose out of the 20th Century civil rights revolution in the U.S. The challenge that CRT foregrounds is historically based on subordination of the descendants of the African Diaspora by the accepted centrality of the white, male perspective. This paper seeks to present CRT as both a discourse in, and a critique differentiable from CHRD, and to suggest methodologies bridging the differences.

Keywords: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Critical Legal Studies (CLS), Critical Human Resource Development (CHRD)

“To be an African-American living in the North American segment of the Diaspora is to be the descendent of a tradition of marginalization based on systems of racial oppression” (Daniels, 2005, p. 60). Subordination of generations of people based on color has been a central and continuing societal scourge in the United States, and much of the battle to overcome its egregious effects have originated in the legal academy. Liberal humanist lawyers fought this battle during the fifties and sixties resulting in several landmark cases (e.,g., Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), but challenges arose when legal academics such as Derrick Bell began to question the marginalization of the voices of the aggrieved parties. In critiquing the issue of professional responsibility of the liberal lawyers representing the plaintiffs in cases brought to implement the Brown decision Bell noted that these lawyers essentially substituted their own ideas of what was good for their African-American clients, rather than listening to and validating as equal or central the issues their clients brought up (Bell, 1995).

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This dichotomous reality foregrounds the central idea of Critical Race Theory (CRT): that racial subordination and oppression of indigenous descendents of a Diaspora—African- Americans, Latinos, Asians—is based upon the centrality of white perceptions of privilege and perspective; other perspectives are marginalized (West, 1993, 1995, Harris, 1993, Brookfield, 2003).

Critical HRD, or CHRD as denominated in Sambrook and Hatcher (2005) is an emerging paradigm that challenges the existing positivistic research methodologies in HRD. HRD has traditionally been seen as an unproblematic discipline devoted to performance improvement in organizations, but newer, more critical approaches challenge HRD itself as being problematic. Its definition is not clearly agreed upon (citing Lee, 1998; McLean, 1998), positivist research methodologies fail to answer questions which sound in meaning-making, and thus the need to answer what might be termed “why” questions is becoming increasingly important. Billing (2000) described the operational application of the term ‘critical’ to scholarly research, discipline, and theory-making as communicating two related messages: (a) applying social inequality analysis to existing domains of research and practice; (b) or opposing existing domains which are seen as failing to address social inequality . In internal HRD discourse Bierema (2000) argues that the postmodern knowledge sector of society has shifted work from a human activity, and part of the life world, to a machine system which seeks optimal performance, and which has traded the life world for the money world. HRD’s allegiance has been shifted in turn from humans to the organization. The focus on and allegiance to organizationally based performativity goals cause educators and the systems they work in and foster to lose sight of the meaning of being human.

CHRD parallels and is ontologically related to critical theory in law, or Critical Legal Studies (CLS). CLS arose in the academy, largely at Harvard law school, in the late 70’s as a neo-Marxist legal academy analogue to critical theory from the Frankfort School and its progeny (Critical Race Theory, 1995). CLS has two fundamental structures for its foundation: first, that the traditional liberal humanist argument that legal discourse should be distinct from political discourse and context is wrong, and perpetuates oppressive social wrongs, such as racial discrimination in law and practice; second, that the law’s positivist rationale for deciding adversary issues fails to adequately address social justice questions, instead favoring a commercial viewpoint. CLS also critiques the hegemonic context of positivist based legal education, including Continuing Professional Education, or CPE (Boghosian, 2005). CLS deconstructs the legal system in the U. S. as a political and social tool which seeks to imprint a dominant group positionality on civil society (Melone & Karnes, 2003).

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CRT’s challenge to both CHRD and CLS arises from the same epistemological and philosophical place. Critical Race Theory arose as a race based critical reaction to CLS because African-American and minority law faculty and students saw that the Eurocentric nature of CLS itself did not adequately address the issues raised by racial discrimination in the U. S. The most important distinction of CRT from traditional legal scholarship on race issues is the way that CRT does not exclude instances of racial injustice as being an exception from a general tendency, and are thus amenable to a neutral or objective point of view. What CRT maintains is that the underlying culture and system in the U. S is racist and oppressive and merely trying to redress specific instances of exceptions to a practice based upon an allegedly fair sharing in a meritocracy is inapposite; because of the inherent reality of white supremacy, no meritocracy exists, nor can real change from the fundamental oppressive system realistically happen under current liberal humanist thought. The preservers of the status quo merely regroup under “race neutral’ standards for everyone, thus maintaining a position of privilege (Crenshaw, 1995; Delgado & Stefanic, 2001). The issue for CHRD in midst of its own definitional struggles parallels the tension between CLS and CRT: CLS and CHRD are both fundamentally based on the same epistemology; CHRD critiques a rationalist/capitalist positivistic learning and research methodology, while CLS critiques the U. S. legal system, including legal education, as a rationalist/capitalist/positivistic hegemony; CRT challenges both critiques because they fail to acknowledge the egregious effect that the centrality of white privilege and the resultant racism has on the emancipation of African-Americans and those of color.

While CHRD is an emerging domain in the HRD academy—the effect on the HRD practice is inchoate—the current status of CRT in the HRD academy might be compared to the first walking creatures emerging from the primordial ocean. The most important study on CRT in relationship to critique of HRD scholarship and practice was published recently by Bernier & Tocco, Working in the Margins of Critical Race Theory and HRD (2003). Their paper’s purpose was to examine the assumptions and paradigms used in discourse about diversity and equity in HRD examined through the lens of CRT. The study was based on sixteen recent publications in the Human Resource Development Quarterly (2005). Both an Internet search of Google and Google Scholar and Yahoo, an ERIC database search, and an ILSCO library database search returned zero results for any other papers specifically on CRT and HRD, although an unpublished manuscript, What’s Critical Race Theory Got to do with HRD ? (n.d) by Bristol, was found. The challenge for HRD scholars and practitioners is not to be dissuaded by the paucity of scholarship or the need to personally interrogate their own perspectives (Brookfield, 2000, 2003), but to be excited about the possibilities of expanding and enlightening discourse and research in the transformation of HRD scholarship and practice from mainly performance based goals to emancipatory ones; let the voices of the racially marginalized be heard.

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Research Question and Theoretical background

Discursive analysis is a central precept of critical theory (Sambrook, 2006, Brookfield, 2000). This has particular relevance to CHRD and HRD scholarship given the debate over what these terms mean. HRD researchers are searching for new ways of framing the discourse and the consequent questions of practice and theory that arise as the HRD definition evolves. The role of HRD to promote corporate social responsibility publicly along with a need to promote individual emancipation and socio-political transformation of the organizations they work in is also being advanced by HRD scholars. Critical theory is thus entering into and affecting the on-going discourse regarding the definitions of HRD and CHRD. Three suggested rationales are briefly introduced in this paper.

In her recent paper on CHRD Sambrook offered a way to conceptualize critical forms of discursive analysis through concept analysis (Sambrook, 2006a). Concept analysis ranges from the directly experienced to the more abstractly imagined, and can be discursive or non- discursive. CHRD’s epistemology does not operate well in scientific and positivist conceptual approaches as described by Walker and Avant (1986); rather its definitional and paradigm challenges are better visualized through a more social constructionist and discursive approach as described by Rodgers (1989). Concept analysis operates through seven methodologically relative research elements: attributes, antecedents, related concepts, consequences, model cases, contrary cases, and borderline cases. Attributes are factors upon which the concept exists; antecedents are personal and organizational factors influencing how the concepts are enacted; related concepts include training, employment development, organizational management, CHRD; consequences are outcomes of enacting the concepts; while model, contrary, and borderline cases seek to explain, empirically or theoretically how CHRD works in practice. These elements operate relatively depending on the situational parameters of the model used.

Bernier and Tocco (2003) use a qualitatively based literature review in their critical race study. They take the position that key areas of HRD and human resource management, including recruitment, selection, and compensation and organizational culture, or employee relations (citing Ensher, et. al, 2001) are affected by perceptions grounded in diversity, race, and gender. Interrogating these perceptions through the lens of CRT may help to ameliorate stereotypical attitudes affecting women and minorities. Their methodology—coding and evaluating 16 articles published in the Human Resource Development Quarterly --is based upon four basic CRT tenets: (a ) racism appears ordinary to people in American society; (b) storytelling (or narrative) explicates the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that constitute the dominant racial view; (c) the critique of liberalism on the basis of its dependence on incremental changes in law and society; and (d) the primary beneficiaries of civil rights legislation have been white women.

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Resort to law based epistemology in CHRD also may be fruitful for HRD researchers seeking to use CRT as a methodological and ontological base. Carbado’s and Gulati’s (2003) extensive book review, critiquing Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Theory, (2002) for the Yale University Law Review explores illuminating connections between CRT and another legal discourse, law and economics theory (L & E). Given the positivist nature of legal practice and research methodology (Boghasian, 2005, Langdell, 1887) and its parallel to similar positivist paradigmatic practice in HRD (Sambrook, 2006a) quantitatively based, empiricist researchers may find fruitful inspiration by a careful reading of the review. The review seeks to bridge usefully the paradigm gap between CRT and L & E as putatively oppositional discourses. L & E draws its methodological base from rational actors in perfect markets; L & E is grounded on the rationalist position that markets act in the interests of rational actors, employers act efficiently, and organizational decisions are incentivized and can be examined through quantitative analysis; market efficiency determines workplace strategy and outcomes; race is an independent variable, a variable which because it is assumed is considered fixed, static, and thus measurable. CRT views race as the major dependent variable; race is a social construction, evolving dialectically in reaction to historical, social, political, and economic contexts. L & E proponents are criticized as advancers of a conservative, oppressive agenda, holding back marginalized peoples while upholding the agenda of the dominant classes; CRT proponents are criticized as mainly proponents of a racial program, seeking to advance their own ideological agendas. Carbado & Gulati argue that this gap is bridgeable; they urge a microdynamics of race . CRT too often views racial dynamics from a macro perspective, not considering workplace interplay such as performative behavior (employees of color’s tendency to suppress racialist traits or behaviors that might impair them from employment or advancement, and foreground those that are more acceptable to the white mainstream), while L & E fails to consider race as a dialectic affecting and being affected historically. Microdynamically based CRT research offers a way for strategic study of CHRD to merge quantitatively based systems of workplace learning inquiry with the qualitative critique of CRT in a socially useful way.

a CRT/L&E engagement helps to cure some of the deficiencies in both fields. For example, CRT’s notion of race as a social construction can help L&E scholars move to a dynamic conception of race, and L&E’s focus on the incentive effects of legal and institutional (norm-based) constraints can help CRT scholars analyze the ways in which the pressures and constraints of the workplace shape both employer and employee behavior. (p. 1761)

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Conclusion and Implications CRT is discursively situated; one example is its insistence on the use of narrative as part of the way to communicate, legitimate, and centralize black conceptualizations of gained history, while unpacking those based on White supremacist beliefs or assumptions. Black scholar and law professor Patricia Williams recently spoke to concerns raised by those who constitute a backlash against CRT:

They take a fluidly left-learning group and depict it as a idiotically “ “separatist” right-wing monolith...Critical Race Theory is treated as a conceptual ghetto filled with dangerous low-income scholarship unworthy of reading, never mind careful reading. From there, it is easy to believe whatever misquoted, misconstrued blather is said to stream from the mouths of those...anti-intellectual thugs with “blood” on their Singular Mind—theirs being, of course, the True Black Mind that fabricates faster than Madame Defarge could knit. (Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory , foreword p. xvi).

HRD scholars are presented with an opportunity and a challenge to include CRT ontology and analysis in their research, and practice as an integral, but differentiable part of CHRD. CRT is a racialized epistemology, but from the perspective of African-Americans and others of color who are descendants of the Diaspora, so are Eurocentric views of teaching and learning (Brookfield, 2003). Racializing (realizing that race plays an integral part of individual and organizational perspectives dependent on who the individual is, or who controls the organization) educational epistemology means deconstructing prevailing Eurocentric discourses and opening up inquiry and study to include philosophies, research approaches, and training practices that reflect other racial traditions (Brookfield).

As Carbado & Gulati’s article reveals CRT based research also offers ample opportunity for quantitatively based research. A literature review of diversity and law-based scholarship in workplace issues of all types reveal a rich and untapped vein of methodology and epistemology useful to HRD/CHRD. Diversity is a recognized area of HRD practice, and one in which much debate exists as to focus or efficacy (Ross-Gordon & Brooks, 2004: Carbado & Mulati, 2003; Bristol, n.d). Ross-Gordon and Brooks note that it is important that workplace learning research be expanded across epistemological boundaries, and that research scholars “keep...a careful watch on how our own backgrounds and assumptions influence our research questions and designs, as well as our theory-building.” (p. 16). Fenwick makes the following statement as to the necessity for CHRD to be a broad tent

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A critical HRD stream would not presume to supplant existing conceptions of HRD in a totalizing fashion, but would develop as one among the multiple paradigms coexisting in this pluralistic field. A critical HRD might even open a middle space in schools of education—a site where those committed to critical perspectives in adult learning, worker’s lives, organization studies, and human development could inform and support one another’s research and practice. (Fenwick, 2004, p. 194).

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