Beyond Common Ground: Dialogical Responsibility in Sustainable Human Resource Management.

Area of Science:

• Organizational Studies
• Ethics
• Human Resource Management

Background:

• Sustainable human resource management (HRM) emphasizes pluralism and stakeholder inclusivity.
• Intended dialogue is a key practice, yet its role in achieving pluralism is under-theorized.
• Dialogue is often idealized, potentially masking power dynamics and suppressing dissent.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce the intended dialogical responsibility (IDR) model, reconceptualizing dialogue.
• To reframe dialogue not as consensus-seeking but as a space for exploring irreducible differences.
• To offer a theoretical foundation for ethically responsive dialogue in sustainable HRM.

Main Methods:

• Conceptual paper drawing on dialogical ethics (Buber, Levinas, Bakhtin) and framing theory.
• Introduces the IDR model, proposing dialogical responsibility as an ethical 'thirdness'.
• Utilizes framing theory to distinguish micro, meso, and macro-level frames.

Main Results:

• The IDR model reconceptualizes dialogue as a reflective space for irreducible differences.
• Dialogical responsibility acts as a mediating presence, encouraging openness and attention to power asymmetries.
• Dialogue is viewed as a dynamic, reflexive, multilevel process of meaning co-construction and contestation.

Conclusions:

• The paper contributes a multilevel theoretical model to sustainable HRM literature.
• Offers sensitizing questions to foster ethically responsive dialogue and navigate pluralism.
• Provides a conceptual foundation for managing dialogue in complex organizational settings.