Theorizing Human Resource Development Practices in Extended Contexts

Mainstream human resource development (HRD) views are based on assumptions derived from organizations and societies in the western open contexts. They are inadequate and misleading in explaining the causality and regularities of HRD practices in non-mainstream closed contexts, which account for majority countries according to the 2022 World Press Freedom Index. As the fourth study in a progressive multi-stage theorizing program, we theorize HRD as multi-level and multi-context practices to decode the causality and regularities from open to closed sociopolitical contexts. We adopt an emancipatory theoretical stance to derive law-like axioms and theorems of HRD with its corresponding host system (HIS) contexts. We do so through formal and theoretical language and abstraction. We provide illustrative cases at the organizational and national levels to demonstrate the applicability of our theorizing. We further discuss implications for HRD theory, research, and practice, as well as limitations and future research directions for continued theorizing.