Guest Editorial – Historical Perspectives

Human Resource Development Review’s mission is no mystery. It exists to publish work that makes a theoretical contribution to the development of theory, the foundations of HRD and reviews of the relevant literature. The journal does not, however, publish work whose central focus is empirical findings, or empirical method and design. When the journal’s Editor, Yonjoo Cho, invited me to guest edit that part of the anniversary issue that would be devoted to papers on the history of human resource development, the extent to which potential contributors found it difficult to imagine how to write history without a central focus on empirical findings was not yet obvious. There was, however, a substantial number of potential authors who were interested in how they could contribute historical articles to HRDR. History, as defined by the aims of scope of the journal, is only one type of foundations of HRD that can be investigated. HRDR considers the concept of foundations to cover a wide range of possible contributions, that is, ‘papers that ... might address philosophies of HRD, historical foundations, definitions of the field, conceptual organization of the field, and ethical foundations’ (sagepub.com). The problem being – from an outsider perspective – that there does not seem to be much, if any, debate about what constitutes the history of HRD in the US.