Final seminar: Agneta Häll

About the seminar

Human Resources (HR) as a professional field has developed in the 20th century and evolved from an employee-oriented perspective to providing management support to the organization’s line managers on issues relating to employees and managers in organizations in the latter part of the 20th century. In Sweden, a particular form of human resources work developed from a social policy perspective in the first part of the 20th century, which was then developed in the post-war period through trade union-employer cooperation and labor market legislation, which had a major impact on this professional field. In the latter part of the 20th century, HR practitioners in Scandinavian organizations have tried to move their positions forward in public and private organizations. This ambition to become a force to be reckoned with has been met with varying degrees of success being problematized by researchers as a long-standing dilemma among HR practitioners, wanting to gain more power and status through their unique competence by demonstrating their contribution to the performance of organizations. Primarily US scholars have suggested new directions for HR functions and HR practitioners, orientations that have been adopted in other cultural environments such as Sweden and the Nordic countries. During the last decades the most influential is Dave Ulrich, (Ulrich 1997; Ulrich and Brockbank 2005) who together with other researchers has contributed extensive literature in the field introducing the management model of Human Resource Transformation (HRT), business partnering and the Human Resource Business Partner (HRBP) work role. The Ulrich model has had a great impact on HR functions way of working in private and public organizations in Sweden and other western countries over the last two decades. This management model advocates a shift from an administrative and service oriented focused HR function to demonstrate HR’s value adding capacity and enhance the development of HR strategies.

This thesis follows the development of HR work in Sweden during the 2000s. To this end, I have chosen to study how the HRT and HRBP management models have affected HR work and the HR profession in a global industrial group with a strong Scandinavian identity over a period of twelve years as discussed in papers I and II. To follow how the professional development of HR practitioners has evolved in the 2020s and whether professionalization of the profession is a way forward, an independent study has been conducted, which is discussed in papers III and IV.   In total the empirical data has been collected from 111 individuals over a period of 17 years.  

The purpose of this thesis is therefore to follow the professional development of HR practitioners and the conditions for this development in the age of HRT in a Scandinavian environment through a critical lens.

The contribution of the thesis is to problematize the lack of contextualization of the management concept for HR work in a Swedish context and how this has consequences for HR practitioners and line managers. Furthermore, the introduced management model for HRM work affects knowledge development and knowledge sharing within HR functions and collaboration with line managers through the model's fragmentation of HR work, but also HR professionalization efforts. In conclusion, professionalization efforts have had a limited impact, and the profession is too fragmented to achieve a traditional and unified profession. Moreover, the development of HR professionals' position and professional identity takes place in an organizational context and based on individual circumstances. Finally, that a possible way forward is to work more ‘connective’, both within the HR function but also with other areas of expertise outside the HR function.