Laura L. Bierema – författare

Human Resource Development: Critical Perspectives and Practices is a landmark textbook on HRD scholarship and practice and is a significant departure from the standard HRD texts available. Based on Bierema and Callahan’s framework for critical human resource development, this book develops an understanding of HRD that addresses both key and contested issues of practice associated with relating, learning, changing, and organizing for organizations.

This book covers the basic tenets of HRD, interrogates the dominant paradigms and practices of the field, teaches readers how to critically assess HRD practices and outcomes, and provides critical alternatives. The text also addresses HRD as a contested field and the importance for HRD professionals to reflect on their values, maintain their sanity, and retain their employment while attempting to do this difficult work that serves multiple stakeholders.

The text weaves in Points to Ponder, Case in Point, and Tips & Tools features and exercises, giving readers an insight into HRD issues across the globe. This critical text offers an exciting alternative to the instrumentalist, managerialist, and masculine perspective of other books.

Designed for students and practitioners, this textbook will be essential reading for upper-level courses on human resource development, human resource management, and adult education.

Human Resource Development: Critical Perspectives and Practices is a landmark textbook on HRD scholarship and practice and is a significant departure from the standard HRD texts available. Based on Bierema and Callahan’s framework for critical human resource development, this book develops an understanding of HRD that addresses both key and contested issues of practice associated with relating, learning, changing, and organizing for organizations.

This book covers the basic tenets of HRD, interrogates the dominant paradigms and practices of the field, teaches readers how to critically assess HRD practices and outcomes, and provides critical alternatives. The text also addresses HRD as a contested field and the importance for HRD professionals to reflect on their values, maintain their sanity, and retain their employment while attempting to do this difficult work that serves multiple stakeholders.

The text weaves in Points to Ponder, Case in Point, and Tips & Tools features and exercises, giving readers an insight into HRD issues across the globe. This critical text offers an exciting alternative to the instrumentalist, managerialist, and masculine perspective of other books.

Designed for students and practitioners, this textbook will be essential reading for upper-level courses on human resource development, human resource management, and adult education.

Laura L. Bierema discusses careers as lifelong learning, development, and change processes that are individual learning experiences and engagements within organizational, cultural, and community contexts. Chapters distinguish career explorers (those looking for an ideal vocation), from career sustainers (those maintaining their current vocation) and career changers (those seeking to shift to a new vocation). Assessing career development theories, practices, and outcomes using a critical, intersectional, feminist lens, the book emphasizes the importance of a healthy career-life balance. Theoretically grounded, the book also has practical applications, and features prompts for reflective practice to encourage interactive learning.

Providing a critical analysis of adult work and career issues, Rethinking Adult Career Development will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of business, human resources and organizational behaviour. Business managers, career advisers, career coaches, team leaders and policymakers will also benefit from the book’s exploration of systematic issues that can broadly affect careers.

This multidisciplinary book represents an initial attempt to connect adult learning and knowledge management in theory and practice. It provides educators, learners and organizational development professionals with new strategies and resources for developing active and effective pedagogies, which in turn prepare learners and practitioners to manage knowledge in organizations and higher education. To do so, it gathers contributions and case studies from a diverse, global team of authors and provides a theoretical and practical outline of new strategies and methods for facilitating adult teaching and learning. It also provides a fresh reading of active learning methods, by adopting a knowledge management viewpoint that is broadly applicable, whether helping students master content in university courses, or helping organizations learn and change.