Sustainable HRM: An extension of the paradox perspective

Abstract

Sustainable human resource management (HRM), perceived as challenging the dominant models of strategic HRM, concerns the adoption of HRM strategies and practices to achieve simultaneously financial, social, environmental, and HR regeneration goals, to satisfy diverse stakeholders' competing demands and, increasingly, national legislative requirements of sustainability performance reporting. Tensions are placed at the centre of sustainable HRM's analysis, as stakeholders demands are contrasting, when seen individually, but yet interrelated, as part of an integrated whole. The paradox perspective of sustainable HRM is useful in identifying several HRM paradoxes and proposing different coping strategies. However, the role of organizational actors, their cognition and strategy-making action, has been completely ignored in a highly conceptual paradoxical analysis of sustainable HRM. Drawing on the cognitive theory (and cognitive framing) and the practice theory (and strategy-as-practice), this paper contributes by bringing organizational actors back into the analysis, proposing three interrelated processes, namely, activating individual cognitive frames, creating collective dominant frames, and strategizing through enacting strategy-making activities, to address the theoretical gaps and extend the paradox perspective of sustainable HRM.