Abstract:
This paper was originally offered at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management, December 2005, and was awarded Best Paper (out of about 50) in the HRM stream. After revision it was published in the journal in February 2008 and was later awarded a "Highly Commended" Award, putting it in the best 4 of about 40 papers published in the journal during 2008. Building on my long-term interest in metaphor in business terminology, the paper offers what I believe to be the first-ever substantial critique of the term "human resources" as commonly applied to the employees of organizations. In the paper I criticize the term as presenting employees as passive commodities rather than active agents, thereby de-humanizing them and creating an invidious managerial discourse. I put forward career studies, with its metaphors of individuals as active agents utilising organizational resources to benefit their careers, as an alternative or complementary view, and I suggest alternative terminologies.