Advances in Developing Human Resources

http://adh.sagepub.com/ Critical Pedagogy and Implications for Human Resource Development

Phyllis M. Cunningham Advances in Developing Human Resources 2004 6: 226 DOI: 10.1177/1523422304263430 The online version of this article can be found at: http://adh.sagepub.com/content/6/2/226

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10.1177/1523422304263430 Advances for Developing Human Resources Cunningham / CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND HRD

ARTICLE

Critical Pedagogy and Implications for Human Resource Development

Phyllis M. Cunningham
The problem and the solution. When confronted with workplace learning, personnel in human resource development (HRD) tend to concentrate on internal processes, techniques to manipulate behavior (performance), and yield to pervasive and often pernicious accountability schemes that trivialize learning. The standpoint of this article is to take a macro-historical view contextualizing the worker, the organization, and the entity (capital) into an accountability framework that privileges quality of life of citizens above commoditization and fast capitalism. Keywords: critical pedagogy; capitalism; social dimension of learning; politics of learning

May 2004

What is our ultimate concern as educators wherever we practice our craft? This is for many of us a central question. For it is on that concern that we build our philosophy and our commitment. It is what keeps us from conceptualizing what we do as merely technique and ourselves as technicians. The primary concern for any educator is to seek a better society as defined by its participating citizens. This seems so patently clear that it is difficult to see how we have gotten so caught up in disregarding the obvious. The human being is more than an economic being; we are social, aesthetic, cultural, sexual beings, and we have many selves, many intelligences, and many rationalities. There is more to life than work that has been commoditized and is defined by commodities. In fact, if we look critically at our lives, we realize that we even must be programmed to desire these commodities and other desires must be obliterated in the process and made dormant so that we become one-dimensional (Marcuse, 1964), responding passively to media manipulation (Haymes, 1995). There is a growing literature critiquing Western society as rationally gone mad or, put another way, push rationality to its extremes and you become irrational (Briton, 1996; Collins, 1998; Hart, 1992). This was what the Frankfort school saw when it critiqued the enlightenment. For the
Advances in Developing Human Resources Vol. 6, No. 2 May 2004 226-240 DOI: 10.1177/1523422304263430 Copyright 2004 Sage Publications

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enlightenment, which had the promise of bringing a robust high civilization through science and technology, also brought the dark efficiency and effectiveness of tyrannical Nazi concentration camps on the right and Stalins gulags on the left. In Germany, human beings were put on the assembly line. One of the first human resource development (HRD) research experiments occurred in this dehumanizing environment (Nabb, 2002), underscoring the importance of answering the why as well as the how question. There are three purposes for this article. The first is to make explicit the importance of the social dimension of learning. It will be argued that learning is dialectic between the personal and the social dimensions; that is to say, persons are framed by and embedded in their social structures, and social structures are constructed and shaped by persons. Therefore, an individual cannot be understood or conceptualized outside of his or her social and political context. The second purpose is to move from this social analysis of learning to the historical and legal development of training that has ensued over the purpose of education in the workplace, using mainly Schieds (2001) historical description of the roots of HRD as well as Millons (2003) legal analysis of corporate personhood. The final purpose of this article is to refer to the macro forces within globalization and link worker education to the building of civil society.

Learning and Developing Human Resources Is Not Simply an Individual Activity

Phyllis, you know what this training in industry is all about dont you? . . . Its about controlthats what its about. (Steven Treffman, doctoral student, University of Chicago, 1969)

Monica Lee (2001) provided a typology of four gradients when she refuses to define HRD. She calls HRD devised by owners as a shaping gradient because owners are shaping the workers and controlling them. She contrasts that to the emergent gradient as one in which workers are in charge and in which very different outcomes might occur than in the shaping gradient. Lee goes on to point out that HRD is complex, and depending on your philosophythe why questionthere are different approaches and different activities and very different discourses going on. In sociological terms, there is both a manifest and a latent function to training, thus Treffmans astute observation. If one wishes to shape workers, one turns to psychology. Rubenson (1989) argued that North American adult education has been psychologized. By that, he means that the practice of adult education, which historically centered itself in civil society as a voluntary activity and could be found in citizen actions and on the edge of social movements (and in the labor movement), has been transformed into a field based on the analysis of the individual. In fact, Rubenson argues that

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the psychological domination of adult education in North America prevents a serious and much needed penetration of the theoretical and empirical problems posed in the two questions: To what extent does education make society better by making it more egalitarian and to what extent does education legitimize and even enhance, existing social and economic inequalities? (p. 66)

This author is in agreement with Rubenson, preferring to think of the individual as biography. By this, meaning that the very notion of individual is socially constructed; that is, an individual is contextualized in the history, culture, and social fabric of the society in which he lives. This personal biography intersects and interacts with social structures. In thinking of a person as biography, the authors intent is to avoid the limitations of constructivist psychology (i.e., Candy, 1991) or social interactionists (i.e., London, 1964), in which the focus is still on the individual (Cunningham, 1998), wishing neither to privilege the individual nor the structures but to see both in a dialectical relationship. For it is the education of adults as it occurs in social movements in relationship to social structures that is the basis of the critical pedagogy of adults (Briton, 1996; Collins, 1991; Hart, 1992; Newman, 1994; Zacharakis-Jutz, 1988). To understand this fetish of individualizing, we have to see that biography captures the concept that a person is distinct not only because of biology but because of history and the social/political constructions of race, gender, and social class in which he was born. It is at these intersections that we find the complex person. But in North America, we have championed a disembodied individual who is made central to our politics and our educational conceptualizations. We act as though individuals have no debt to their social groupbut where do individuals find their culture, their values, their ethics, their meaning in life if it is not from their group? It is the group-society that is constructed by individuals and then becomes a force to shape the very individuals that constructed it. Thus, looking out at our environment and naming it and giving meaning to it is how we construct ourselves socially, and it is these social constructions that become our reality and then these constructions in turn affect who we become (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Shain (1994) wrote that in North America, a dilemma developed in regard to moral issues as to the
preeminence to be awarded the publics needs over those of the individual, the protection of nonconforming individuals or ethnic or religious minorities, the best means of fostering human flourishing and the appropriateness of public ethical intrusions into the self-regarding behavior of the individual. Each of these two patterns of thought, one communal and the other individualistic, [the older one] was a localistic oral culture based on face-to-face relations while the newer one was abstract, general, and based on the written word. The first pattern was popular while the other was based on a formal tradition in the custody of elites. (p. 147)

One can see that Adam Smiths ideas have strongly influenced one form of adult education called HRD. For Adam Smith, charity was a weakness, not strength. For him, it was not love but ambition and self-seeking effort that was a

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humans leading virtue. He believed that individuals should fend for themselves and have the freedom to enjoy whatever their initiative and hard work earn (Watt, 1989, pp. 16-17). This was their contribution to society, and it was assumed that there were no powerful social structures shaping social activity. In other works, social mobility in an idealized society replaced the idea of social change (Moghaddam, 1997, p. 105). Dewey (as quoted in Watt, 1989), more than 80 years ago, criticized the domination of large corporations over the economy and its efforts on making workers private and egoistic: An economic individualism of motives and aims underlies our present corporate mechanisms, and undoes the individual (pp. 102-103). Dewey (1916) distinguished between ideological individualism, characterized as egoism privileging the wealthy with the free development of the individual within a sense of community. Deweys critique of individualism included moral grounds: Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a selfenclosed continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else (p. 297). If one critiques self-directed learning, level playing field, education as an equal opportunity role sorter, and niched learning, these may unduly emphasize individual in its rawest sense. Several years ago at the national meeting of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE), there were two major general session speakers: First, a human resource (HR) person from Sprint described todays workplacecomputers in your car, at home, in the office, on the lapcheck indo you have a jobcheck daily. Are you efficient?if not, goodbye, and if yes, how can you become more efficient? She argued that you are an individual and you should recognize that the employers responsibility is to increase your productivity, not to give you a job. The second speaker spoke of a new industry being created to help individuals market themselves in case they were pink slipped. It was a career counseling service. Be ready in case you are fired. Keep preparing for a new position. This was unbelievable. The uncritical nature of those presentations modeled a too frequent response of adult educators. Uncritically, educate workers to the new workplace. Our primary goal in education is to make productive workers or, in HRD-ese, its all about performance (Swanson & Arnold, 1997). These were the major messages for educators at a national conference. In the field of HRD, practice is typically viewed as a process for developing and unleashing human expertise through organization development and personnel training and development for the purpose of improving performance (Swanson & Holton, 2001, p. 4). Learning is subordinate to performance. The newest buzzwords picked up at that AAACE conference were high-performance culture and portability. High-performance culture

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meant uncritically making more widgets faster and with quality, and portability was a new way of letting workers know that they are unimportant to the employer because any skills learned on the job are yours and are portable. So if we can keep the workers eye on her individual skills portabilityshe wont be upset with being a contingent worker, a just-in-time hire, an object of right sizing, or wondering why she has an ulcer because of being technologically wired all day. After all, she is storing up free human capital every day at the employers expense. Martin (2000) argued that there are two discourses of citizenship that dominate current adult education policy and practice; one sees the adult learner as worker or producer and the other sees her as consumer or customer. Both are economic interpretations with adult education seen as a commodity. Martin rejects this interpretation as being too narrow and argues that it must include active citizenship and social inclusion. This myth of individualism permeates education at the workplace perhaps more strongly than in any other form of adult education. It has isolated the worker for even in team learning, the independent variable is performance. Thus, the language is instrumental, the central reasons for cooperation are economic, and if there are personal payoffs, they are incidental or accidental. This is not learning for living, it is learning for economic survival for avoiding the pink slip or the downsizing. Summary and Implications The important questions become: What does it mean to be a worker? How do we acquire our skills? How do we feel about what we do or make? How do we feel about what we know? Clearly, where scientific management separated knowledge about work from the worker, the workplace became populated with skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers. A systematic de-skilling of the worker occurred so that in 2004, we may have so efficiently de-skilled the workplace that we can increase efficiency without employing workers. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves if we should continue de-skilling. Why not leave tacit knowledge alone? We have yet to see whether the jobless economic recovery continues with the economic indicators rising but not the employment rate. Or we can think seriously about a 30-hour workweek and start educating for leisure. Wycliff (2003) suggested that we work too hard (or too much) as Americans. We should relax more. Clearly, we vacation less than any other industrialized country. But Wycliff is arguing that leisure is important by quoting Thoreau:
Actually the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has not time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorancewhich his growth requireswho has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously

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Whatever the case, surely we need to think anew.

Learning and Developing Human Resources Is Not Solely for Organizational Productivity
Schied (2001) built a critical historical analysis of present-day HRD by examining three themes: (a) Taylorism and the emergence of corporate training, (b) the capitulation of labor at the bargaining table post World War II, and (c) the hegemonic grip of human capital theory on the practice of HRD. In these three themes, Scheid searches for the origins and social forces that forged the social structures that frame training today, thus allowing us to move to a macro analysis of workplace learning. Taylorism and scientific management supported by the growth of technology allowed control to move from the worker to the manager. Schied (2001) has credited Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne studies as legitimizing human relations and providing us conceptually with workers as flawed by their psychological needs and their personal situation or as Schied suggests, there are no robust collective autonomous union voices in solidarity now we have an individual worker in deficit. Industrial psychology came into being and the manipulation of individual workers by what Monica Lee (2001) calls the shaping gradient is standard operating procedure (SOP). Schied (2001) noted that following World War II, the unions were at their greatest strength and shared involvement in many aspects of running the shop floor, including training in some industries. In short, labor sought and, in some instances, co-managed the industry. Co-management did not occur permanently, however. Rather, because of complex social forces, unions accepted dramatic increases in wages, strong pension plans, and health and vacation days in exchange for giving up their demands around co-management (p. 130). Training reverted to the personnel function and over the years it has become a tool for shaping and controlling workers behavior in more and more seductive and sophisticated ways. Motivating workers became the new goal, and interpersonal skills training and human technologies became the means. This orientation fit well with human capital theory. Human capital theory is the myth that equates a direct positive relationship of years of education to lifetime earnings and work productivity in the general population without any direct evidence to support this thesis. It appeared to hold true for White males in the United States in the sixties when there were numerous class, racial, and gender discriminations in effect relative to who got jobs. It has been shown not to hold true in numerous other situations (Baptiste, 1994; Berg, 1970; Freeman, 1976). However, the perception of reality is often as good as reality when it comes to develop-

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ing public or even corporate policy. So we constantly train workers for jobs that may or may not exist. If the worker remains unemployed or is downsized or right sized, this is most often perceived to be the workers problem, not the fact that there may not be enough jobs out there for the workers who are trained. Human capital theory undergirds not only education in the workplace but also education within schools, colleges, and universities. The corporatizing of schools speaks to the vocationalization of the curriculum in which much, if not all, of learning is geared toward earning. Production rules the classroom not only in the content that is taught but in the processes that are used (Collins, 1983, 1991). Martin (2000, p. 9) described the new world for us as narrowly conceived with economist forms of vocationalism and competence; one in which we are forced to operate in an educational market place in which knowledge becomes commodified and credentializedand in particular, its workers are subjected to the rigors of the new managerialism, enforcing an accountants view on which we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. To sum up, we are in danger of becoming the compliant purveyors of merely useful knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is constructed to make people productive, profitable, and quiescent workers) as distinct from the active agents of really useful knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is calculated to enable people to become autonomous and, if necessarydissenting citizens). Welton (1995) captured the tension of danger and opportunity with his notion of the lifeworld as a site of contradictory possibilityemancipatory learning or routine domestication. He applies Habermass notion of lifeworld and civil society as an endangered species to opportunities for lifelong learning; the fate of critical education is tied to the fate of the lifeworld. Habermas views the fundamental problem of social theory as knowing how to connect the system and the lifeworld (Welton, 1995, p. 141). Habermas believes that the primary threat to humankind and society is not economic exploitation or political ideologies but rather the encroachment of bureaucratic systems in social relationships, which will make it lose its characteristic human quality and become formalized. Civil society is under siege because of the desiccation of the political public sphere (Welton, 1995, p. 144; see also Holst, 2002). Schied is persuasive in demonstrating from the shop-floor perspective how the struggle has brought us to the present-day arrangements whereby educators uncritically not only mis-educate on the shop floor, metaphorically speaking, but also have developed a humanistic linguistic code to mask its true aim. Martin (2000) and Welton (1993, 1995) moved the analysis to the community, civil society, and the commons. This brings us to the legal critique that takes a different tact because it questions who is part of the contract legally at the point of production.

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The corporate personhood analysis is a legal approach to question the legitimacy of shareholder primacy or wealth maximization. The argument starts with the questioning of the legal status of a corporation. Is the corporation an entity, an aggregate of person, a natural entity (a person), or a set of contracts? All these definitions have been argued, according to Millon (2003), in different historical periods. The entity concept opened up legally the notion that shareholder primacy and wealth maximization was illegitimate because there were social costs incurred that were legitimate. These social costs also had a claim on profits such as employee layoffs, plant closings, poor working conditions, environmental pollution, and financial restructuring. In fact, in the thirties, citizenship theorists substituted a public notion of corporate law, based on the public effects of corporate activity which applied a much richer notion of obligation than a unitary duty to shareholders (p. 11). These ideas of corporate social responsibility (CSR) were countered by property rights claims, but according to Millon (2003), the issue of personhood was side-stepped. A corporation cannot be a person and, at the same time, property. So it is not strange to see the CSR argument resurface in the sixties and again in the seventies with Ralph Nader but with a different argument. The concerns remain, but the argument is now to federalize corporate lawnot to make good citizens but to control Goliaths. More recent analysts prefer to argue nexus of contracts and undermine the corporate person as legal fiction. The contractarians would like to dispose of moral obligation, but clearly, even individuals that enter into contracts have obligations to one another. Some communitarians argue that nonshareholders rely on fair dealing and thus there is a moral obligation on shareholder primacy. Thus, contractarians and communitarians face off on normative arguments just as those arguing corporate personhood. Millon concludes that the question of corporate personhood remains too indeterminate; his solution is to stay with personal obligation within contracts, thus holding persons who make decisions responsible for both shareholder interests and negotiated nonshareholders/social interests. Summary and Implications A broad analysis of the evolution of HRD in the United States helps us to understand the limitations of analyzing HRD as performance because it is clear that (a) there are other legitimate interests in the contract besides shareholdersincluding workers, the community, the environment; (b) both the manifest and latent functions of training can be made clear and options on the type or gradient of HRD one wishes to offer could be put on the table; and (c) the importance of externalities to the analysis of work and education are made clear and become tools to interrogate oppressive condi-

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tions. One sees that it is simplistic to buy into the notion that it is only those who put up the financial capital that have dibs on the ROI. There are several investors who have invested in the process, and the worker, the community, and the environment are legitimate investors. We need to start thinking that way.

Learning and Developing Human Resources Takes Place in Broad Social Cultural Contexts
The World Bank, International Monetary fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the G8 (seven of the worlds richest countries plus Russia) have become household words in North America. Forced out of more than 50 years of relative obscurity, the power brokers from rich countries, which formerly have privately strategized the fate of unrepresented poor countries, must now operate in the open. Furthermore, their agendas are not only being analyzed but they have been changed. No longer is profit maximization for the favored few or structural adjustment requirement for debtor nations the dominant concerns. Now, debt relief, environmental issues, disease control, and poverty are also on the agenda for discussion and for action. Who put these new items on the agenda? Who brought these activities of financial institutions controlled by wealthy nations out into the sunlight for inspection? It began with the WTO meetings in Seattle and continued with thousands of uninvited protesters from dozens of social movements traveling wherever the G8, World Bank, IMF, and WTO met. Most recently, it was Cancun. It was in Seattle that the Turtles and the Teamsters challenged both the state and the markets legitimacy. Now labeled collectively as the anti-globalization movement, these thousands of movement members called the globalization agenda into question. Old and new social movements educated the public with their knowledge created through their collective critical analysis. This is education from the bottom up (Arato & Cohen, 1984). But is it a losing battle? Why is this challenge in the streets? Why isnt it also going on inside the workplace? This is the relevant question for us. If we conceive of macro social structures consisting of the state, the market, and civil society, clearly the market appears to be in control. If we assume that the state has the responsibility to protect and provide a quality of life for its citizens and that one of its functions is to regulate the market, we realize that we have a problem. The robust concept of lifelong learning put forth by UNESCO in 1970 has been gutted of its emancipatory potential to essentially have one goaldevelopment of human capital (Rubenson, 2001). We note that globalization has weakened state sovereignty and that neo-liberal policy (structural adjustment) demands that the state shrink its

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social welfare and social benefits and that the state be in competition with other sovereign states in a race for the bottom. That is to say, to lure private investment, states compete in offering better tax incentives, lax environmental regulations, and weaker labor laws for workers. These activities, for the most part, promote and strengthen corporations (the market) while collateral damage is done to the environment and the resources of the state. Accordingly, civil society becomes even more important. It is this motley collection of voluntary associations, clubs, not-for-profit organizations, and social movements that is the one collective force that can provide the balance to offset the intrusive power of both the market and the state on the citizenry. Hoagland (2001) commented on the point that there is a limit to market forces, as follows:
The authentic backlash they (the protestors) have helped spark is a reaction against the complacent and greedy version of globalization that has been widely hyped and sold in the marketplace of ideas and goods. Criminals and charlatans have joined capitalists in taking advantage of the eras greater flow of trade, capital, and technology across national borders. Internet services turn out to be handy tools, not value-changing spreaders of prosperity and peacefor better and for worse, destiny is not an inevitable product of market force alone but also of human intent and will. (p. 25)

The process of globalization is as old as colonialism but has recently been intensified by the mobility of capital and labor to transcend national boundaries. The impact of the so-called free trade policies and economic theory that privileges the market has strongly affected education. Qualitatively, it has corporatized not only workers education but also the formal schooling system and its curriculum into a market orientation (Press & Washburn, 2000) with a disposable or rotating workforce and the economic squeezing (structural adjustment) of educational and social safety nets from the public sector. Where is the curriculum for citizenship? Where do the schools promote social goals? What educational effort is placed on what the individual owes to society? Our response to these questions is that rarely do our modern schools or does HRD educate for either citizenship or social responsibility. We have corporatized public schools and universities in form and function. We pay very little attention to civil society, concentrating our resources instead on serving the market. Obviously, it is not in the interest of the corporations to have an independent critical workforce, much less an independent critical citizenry mobilized into a strong civil society. Such a situation would balance off the distribution of power not only in the workplace but also at global forums as well. These pressures on formal education force progressive adult educators to the nonformal and informal approaches to education provided in social movements (Cunningham, 1989). Here is where one can link the importance of communicative rationality and the recapturing of our lifeworlds from the devouring technical rationality imposed by the market. Economic activity must be subdued if it attacks the commons, the social fabric, the community. The appropriate goal for economic activity is to build community, not

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privilege, for individuals. Social justice has to be as important as economic growth. The question is: Can it be done in the workplace? Finger introduced the idea of learning our way out through social movements. He started a debate in North America on how knowledge-oriented societies bring about change. He saw new social movements as purveyors of new knowledge (Finger & Asun, 2001). Because Finger discarded modernity and focused on personal transformation, he evoked considerable criticism (Holford, 1995; Spencer, 1995; Welton, 1993). However, he deserves our appreciation for drawing the fields attention to the poverty and narrow vision of formal adult education. He reminded us of our roots, whereby adult education was about democratic social change not simply tooling up workers. The current high interest in lifelong learning is related to globalization. Still, globalization is an unexamined concept by many adult educators. However, persons such as Welton (1995) and Spencer (1995) have argued that those in HRD are not exempt. There is no permanent rapprochement until those in HRD engage in critical pedagogy in the workplace as should their colleagues in academe. Globalization is defined in many ways. A simple definition is that it is the compression of time and space aspects of social relations as well as the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole. The most direct result of globalization is the race to the bottom itself, the reduction in labor, social, and environmental conditions that results directly from the global competition between states for jobs and investments. And who is in chargedriving the bargaining? It is the marketthe chair maker or the sneaker producerlooking for more profit. The direct result of this competition is a lowering of average wages (a decline of 15% in the United States since 1973), slashing of social benefits (subsidized housing, education, health care, economic safety net), temping of the workforce, and longer hours for the worker. We have environmental degradation, exponential growth in greenhouse gases, and overharvesting of national resources in the name of profit and power. Finally, the accumulation of debt causes the money that is earned to be spent on debt reduction rather than consumption, investment, and development (Brecher & Costello, 1994). Among some of the aspects of globalization noted by Brecher, Costello, and Smith (2000, pp. 2-4) are: 1. Production: In the seventies, corporations expanded their factories into low-wage countries. Currently, the U.S. offshore production is 3 times the total value of all American exports. 2. Finance: More than $1.5 trillion flows daily across international borders. Private financial flow to developing countries grew from $44 billion in 1990 to $256 billion 7 years later, a 480% increase. New terms such as fast capitalism, casino capitalism, and turbo capitalism were coined to capture this activity.

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3. Change in global institutions: The WTO, IMF, and the World Bank have enlarged their powers and through their policies accelerated the globalization process. Debtor countries in the South paid creditors in the North $6.5 billion in interest and $6 billion in principle payments per month, as much as the entire Third World spends on education and health. 4. Diminution of the sovereignty of the state: Capital mobility undermines the regulation of corporations; environmental and social protection has been weakened; and neo-liberal ideology encouraging privatization, deregulation, open markets, deflationary austerity and the dismantling of the welfare state were accepted or imposed on governments all over the world. Among this litany of how multinational corporate powers seemingly operate without restraint, there have been a number of corporate breakdowns in the United States: ENRON, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, and most recently, the New York Stock Exchange, the top-of-the-line regulatory agency. Huffington (2003) reported that the nonpartisan coalition of state taxing authorities, the Multistate Tax Commission, released its study stating that corporate tax shelters had cost states $12.4 billion in 2001. Companies sheltering their assets overseas drain another $70 billion from the federal tax treasury. And fast capitalism continues its egoistic, individualistic journey. One can only stand back, amazed. Summary and Implications Can we as adult educators working most closely with the corporate world ignore these facts? It is argued here that our vision should be one that would attempt to learn our way out, not to promote performance to an entity. We need to educate workers on globalism, both from above and below. Workers need to be aware of their history and what is going on in labor movements in other countries. We could certainly do a better job in university HRD curricula. It would be interesting to know how much labor history or labor education is taught in HRD curricula. To what degree are students made aware that many corporations are greedy and impossible places for principled educators to work? How are HRD personnel helped to gain tools for critical analysis?

Conclusion
Learning in the workplace is not about technique; it is about philosophy. No one in HRD can escape the broader questions as to why they are educating workers and what is the function of training in the workplace. Issues of power should be central in the curriculum, and it starts by challenging shareholder primacy as the only legitimate investor in the workplace. Workers and the public interest are also at the table as legitimate partakers. We are not egoistic disembodied contractarians. We are human beings whom all have lives outside of the workplace with families and in the community. We can

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be educators who refuse to learn from history, deniers of global facts, procrastinators that hope the problem will go away, but inevitably the situation will confront us. It seems it is time for a critical turn in HRD.

References
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Welton, M. (1993). Social revolutionary learning: The new social movements as learning sites. Adult Education Quarterly, 43, 152-164. Welton, M. (Ed.). (1995). In defense of the lifeworld. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wycliff, D. (2003, September 11). When work becomes a drag. Commentary. Chicago Tribune, p. 23. Zacharakis-Jutz, J. (1988). Post-Freirean adult education. Adult Education Quarterly, 39, 44-47. Phyllis M. Cunningham is Presidential Teaching Professor and Activist Scholar at Northern Illinois University. She is widely published, has been presented with numerous awards, and was inducted to the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame in 1996. Cunningham earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and has been an active participant in the field of adult education. The main emphasis of much of her work involves focus on community development, participatory research, and critical pedagogy. Cunningham, P. M. (2004). Critical pedagogy and implications for human resource development. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 6(2), 226-240.

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