Prof. Debolina and Prof. Vasanthi win best paper award

Titled ‘Temporality in HRM: The emerging tensions of changing agencies, protocols, and interpretive schemes’, the paper came out best at the INDAM conference

17 JANUARY, 2023: Co-authored by Prof. Debolina Dutta and Prof. Vasanthi Srinivasan, faculty in the OB&HRM area at IIMB, the paper titled ‘Temporality in HRM: The emerging tensions of changing agencies, protocols, and interpretive schemes’ won the best paper award in the HRM Track at the recently concluded INDAM conference in Mumbai.

Widespread fluidity in business ecosystems is emerging due to changes in the environment’s competitive, technological, economic, and social dimensions. While institutional studies have implicitly assumed isochronism, various actors engage simultaneously with different timing norms even within the same organization, leading to contradictory temporal expectations. The temporariness of organizations, fluidity, multiplexity of boundaries, and temporal dynamics question the relevance of many HRM practices and policies. These conflicting norms, practices and expectations generate tensions, which may be shaped by interactions at the meso, macro and micro levels, thwarting HRM and organizational endeavours.

Many management scholars have ignored time’s critical and inescapable influence on human affairs, organizational systems and processes. To capture the complexity of the emerging new order, the paper has adopted a temporal lens to examine the structural changes in HRM practice. Based on practice theory and adopting a temporal lens, as an illustration, it examines the changes in practices and structures emerging due to interactions of various agencies in the context of recruitment. This helps develop an avenue for theorizing the contemporary human resource management ecosystem and the emerging tensions of synchronous/asynchronous machine and human agency structures and practices.

Keywords: Temporality, Practice theory, Structures, Human Resource Management, Recruitment