Who Benefits from HRD? Discourses Evidenced in the REF2014 Impact Case Studies: Working Paper

Although identified as an applied discipline, there have always been challenges for HRD scholars and practitioners to demonstrate the impact of HRD on practice in organisations. Through an analysis of the impact case studies submitted to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) this paper explores the types and beneficiaries of impact claimed by scholars in HRD cases within the Business and Management Unit of Assessment. Societal impact with a wide range of beneficiaries was claimed by most scholars. However further analysis revealed that the cases tended to take a unitarist perspective, ignoring potential negative impacts. Moreover the key beneficiaries claimed were more likely to be organisations and individual learners already engaged in learning or in positions of relative power. In line with this, learning and/or performance discourses were identified in all cases. These findings suggest that discourses presented in the impact case studies may be reinforcing existing power relations rather than responding to critical HRD’s call to challenge them, and encourage scholarly practitioners to be aware of the potential practical implications of these scholarly discourses.