Introduction

This chapter will pull apart the term ‘HRM’, focusing on the ‘human’ in this acronym and what it means for HRM as well as psychoanalysis, as both have ‘skin’ in this specific intellectual domain. I want to begin the process of unsettling HRM and engaging with an excavation of the term is an excellent place to start. How we understand key terms is very important and provides a means by which psychoanalysis might have something interesting and relevant to say about how HRM theorists and practitioners view what it is to be a human. A human that works, and as the term ‘HRM’ suggests, is viewed as a ‘resource’ to be managed alongside financial and other resources. Psychoanalysis also has something to say about why managing this ‘human resource’ might also be trickier than accounted for, something that I will argue the HRM literatures fail to engage with either carefully or fully. As the chapter will highlight, this failure to give an account of what it is to be a human subject or self at work is important and will be taken up repeatedly in this book, especially in Chapter 5's detailed exploration of work.

What does it mean to be human? In the film Arrival, the first word linguist Louise Banks uses to engage with the extraterrestrials (the Heptapods) is ‘human’. In a shaky voice, she writes it on a board and holds it up so that they can see it. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply before moving closer to them.