About us
Welcome to the Professorship for Human Resources and Gender!
These pages contain information about Prof. Dr. Daniela Rastetter and her team.
What is HRM?
Human resource management puts people first, yet it is also a means to an end: The discipline systematically investigates human behavior within the framework of economically driven collaboration. Its objective is to establish structures that encourage people to participate in joint efforts. In a company context, human resource management contributes to solving the issue of transforming labor capacity into performance. It creates jobs, delineates skills, and assigns responsibilities.
And yet: every call for workers invariably attracts human beings. Equipped with their own wills and values, they never submit fully to control. In some cases, this subjectivity can be profitable for organizations, as it produces innovation, creativity, and independent thought; but it can also yield extremely undesirable results, such as counterproductive behavior and a loss of motivation. Subjectivity is the basis of independent thought and action—including defiant thoughts and actions.
Our understanding of human resource management and research focuses on the tension between those two extremes. On the one hand, every company has a justified interest in transforming labor capacity into performance to achieve its goals: profit, education, management, the provision of health care, customer satisfaction, and so on. On the other hand, the justified interests of employees must be taken into consideration, too. These include working-time preferences, stimulating tasks, salary requirements, health care, equality, a pleasant atmosphere at work, etc. In an increasingly heterogeneous labor force, these interests can differ from individual to individual, requiring extensive negotiation.
We take an academically sound approach to human resource management and policy that is based on the social sciences. Our research is distinguished by our political and socioeconomic perspective on practical, economic issues. It focuses in particular on:
Organization instead of the market: An institutional orientation focuses on facilitating and limiting action. At its center are procedures, structures, systems, techniques and methods.
Policy: Human resource management builds on the subjectivity of employees. In any scenario, those who own the labor capacity decide to which extent they will transform it into performance in a committed and constructive (or, indeed, unenthusiastic, destructive, and apathetic) manner. Human resource management must be conceived as a political institution and function.
(Ideological) criticism: We investigate the impact of human resource procedures and forms of labor (e.g., hiring and promotion processes, the subjectivization and flexibilization of work and emotional labor) on health, well-being, and equal opportunity.
We pay particular attention to inequality within organizations, especially with regard to gender, age, culture, immigrant background, and sexual identity.
Our research areas include: staff selection and marketing, eLearning and prerequisites for successful teaching and learning processes, emotional labor within organizations, occupational health, micropolitics, the subjectivization and flexibilization of work, managing diversity and gender issues such as gender balance in organizations, equality and women in management.