Quantifying Human Resources. Clotilde Coron
like to warmly thank all the people working at IAE Paris, the administrative staff and the teachers–researchers, for the stimulating working atmosphere and exchanges. In particular, I would like to thank Patrick Gilbert for his trust, support and wise advice.
My gratitude also goes to Pascal Braun for his attentive review and enriching remarks.
Finally, I would like to thank the team at ISTE, without whom this book would not have been possible.
Introduction
This book arises from an initial observation: quantification has gradually invaded all modern Western societies, and organizations and companies are not exempt from this trend. As a result, the human resources (HR) function is increasingly using quantification tools. However, quantification raises specific questions when it concerns human beings. Consequently, HR quantification gives rise to a variety of approaches, in particular: an approach that values the use of quantification as a guarantee of objectivity, of scientific rigor and, ultimately, of the improvement of the HR function; and a more critical approach that highlights the social foundations of the practice of quantification and thus challenges the myth of totally neutral or objective quantification. These two main approaches make it possible to clarify the aim of this book, which seeks to take advantage of their respective contributions to maintain a broad vision of the challenges of HR quantification.
I.1. The omnipresence of quantification in Western societies
In The Measure of Reality, Crosby (1998) describes the turning point in Medieval and Renaissance Europe that led to the supremacy of quantitative over qualitative thinking. Crosby gives several examples illustrating how widespread this phenomenon was in various fields: the invention and diffusion of the mechanical clock, double-entry accounting and perspective painting, for example. Even music could not escape this movement of “metrologization” (Vatin 2013). It became “measured”, rhythmic and obeyed quantified rules. Crosby goes so far as to link the rise of quantification to the supremacy that Europeans enjoyed in the following centuries.
The author reminds us that the transition to measurement and the quantitative method has been part of a very important change in mentality, and that the deeply rooted habits of a society dominated by quantification today make us partly blind to the implications of this upheaval. Crosby gives several reasons for this upheaval. First, he evokes the development of trade and the State, which has manifested itself in two emblematic places, the market square and the university, and then the renewal of science. But above all, it underlines the importance attached to visualization in the Middle Ages. According to him, the transition from oral to written transmission, whether in literature, music or account books, and the appearance of geometry and perspective in painting, accompanied and catalyzed the transition to quantification, which became necessary for these different activities: tempo and pitch measurement to write music, double-entry accounting to write in accounting books and the calculation of perspectives are all ways of introducing quantification in areas that had not previously benefited from it.
Supiot (2015, p. 104, author’s translation) also notes the growing importance of numbers, particularly in the Western world: “It is in the Western world that expectations of them have constantly expanded: initially objects of contemplation, they became a means of knowledge and then of forecasting, before being endowed with a strictly legal force with the contemporary practice of governance by numbers.” Supiot thus insists on the normative use of quantification, particularly in law and in international treaties and conventions, among others. More precisely, he identifies four normative functions conferred on quantification: accountability (an illustration being the account books that link numbers and the law), administration (knowing the resources of a population to be able to act on them), judging (the judge having to weigh up each testimony to determine the probability that the accused is guilty) and legislation (using statistics to decide laws in the field of public health, for example the preventive inoculation of smallpox that could reduce the disease as a whole but be fatal for some people inoculated in the 18th Century).
I.2. The specific challenges of human resources quantification: quantifying the human being
Ultimately, these authors agree on the central role of quantification in our history and in our societies today. More recently, the rise in the amount of available data has further increased the importance of this role, and has raised new questions, leading to new uses and even new sciences: the use of algorithms in different fields (Cardon 2015; O’Neil 2016), the rise of social physics that uses data on human behavior to model it (Pentland 2014), the study of social networks, etc.
Organizations are no exception to this rule: quantification is a central practice in organizations. Many areas of the company are affected: finance, audit, marketing, HR (human resources), etc. This book focuses on the HR function. This function groups together all the activities that enable an organization to have the human resources (staff, skills, etc.) necessary for it to operate properly (Cadin et al. 2012). Thus, it brings together recruitment, training, mobility, career management, dialog with trade unions, promotion, staff appraisal, etc. In other words, it is a function that manages the “human”, insofar as the majority of these missions are related to human beings (candidates during recruitment, employees, trade unionists, managers, etc.). HR quantification actually covers a variety of practices and situations, which we will elaborate on throughout the book:
– quantification of individuals: measurement of individual performance, individual skills, etc. This practice, the stakes of which are specified in Chapters 1 and 2, can be identified during decisions regarding recruitment, salary raises and promotion, for example;
– work quantification: job classification, workload quantification, etc. This measure does not concern human beings directly, but rather the work they must do. Chapters 1 and 2 will examine this practice at length;
– quantification of the activity of the HR function: evaluation of the performance of the HR function, the effects of HR policies on the organization, etc. This practice, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, becomes all the more important as the HR function is required to prove its legitimacy.
These uses may seem disparate, but it seemed important to us to deal with them jointly, as they overlap on a number of issues. Thus, their usefulness for the HR function, or their appropriation by various agents, constitutes transversal challenges. In addition, in these three types of practices, quantification refers to the human being and/or their activities. However, the possibility of quantifying the human and human activities has given rise to numerous methodological and ethical debates in the literature. Two main positions can be identified. The first, which is the basis of the psychotechnical approach, seeks to broaden the scope of what is measurable in human beings: skills, behaviors, motivations, etc. The second, resulting from different theoretical frameworks, criticizes the postulates of the psychotechnical approach and considers on the contrary that the human being is never reducible to what can be measured.
The psychotechnical approach was developed at the beginning of the 20th Century. It is based on the idea that people’s skills, behaviors and motivations can be measured objectively. As a result, the majority of psychotechnicians’ research focuses on measuring instruments. They highlight four qualities necessary to make a good measuring instrument: standardization, ranking result, fidelity, and validity (Huteau and Lautrey 2006). Standardization refers to the fact that all subjects must pass exactly the same test (hence the importance of formalizing the conditions for taking the test, for example). Similarly,