Personalvetaryrkets förändring över tid - En historisk studie om hur professionaliseringen och akademiseringen av personalvetaryrket återspeglas i platsannonser

Abstract

How organizations work with their personnel strategies has changed a lot over time and today most of them have some kind of function specialized on personnel, this profession is today called Human Resources (HR). Its practitioners is seen as experts on questions regarding personnel and work life. To some extent the profession today further requires an education within personnel science as a form of qualification for its practitioners. At the same time the HR-practitioners today have a various background both academically and professionally. In recent years there has been two societal changes that our study builds upon. Those are the HR-profession discussed endeavor to become a professionalized profession and also the academicization of the european society which has affected the designs of schools in Europe, including the personnel science education. This paper draws on empirical data consisting of job advertisements from the beginning of the 1950’s until today, year 2019. The aim is to see if and how societal changes takes expression in job advertisements directed towards the HR profession. From a historical perspective we aim to examine how the profession’s development, a endeavor against a professionalization, as well as the academicization of the school have been expressed in job advertisements, and over time how the language and layouts of HR-professionals job advertisements and it’s requested competence requirements has changed in relation to those developments. The study was conducted through a discourse analysis and a thematic analysis of job advertisements. The method made it possible for us to investigate if job advertisements reflects societal changes throughout history. We used Fairclough's three-dimensional model for our discourse analysis because it’s a suitable model for a discourse analysis in general and that it is well compatible for studies of job advertisements. A discourse analysis can be used with the purpose to create an increased awareness of the language's different discourses and the impact that social practice has on language, which also fits our study's purpose to investigate different discourses in relation to societal change in job adverts for the HR profession. The results in our study reveal that today’s HR profession still can be seen to have an endeavor towards becoming a professionalized profession. Yet today we cannot define the profession as professionalized in relation to what is requested in recent job adverts in this study. The study also reveals that along the side of the academization of society the employers has increased the request of educated HR-personnel. We draw the conclusion that our study further shows that the development of human resources is an effect of its surroundings and that the HR profession will continue to develop in relation to its society.