Overview
On September 13, 2016 I gave a guest lecture in EADU 819 at the University of Georgia. I was a Ph.D. candidate at the Pennsylvania State University at the time. The lecture asked a simple question that every HRD student meets sooner or later: what belongs to the field and what does not? I answered it in two ways, first through the history of the field and then through the publication record it has left behind.
Contents
- A brief history of HRD: a timeline from learning for survival and craft training, through industrial and wartime training, to the emergence of HRD as a profession led by research.
- Discussions on the HRD paradigm: debates of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s on definitions, boundaries, and the multidisciplinary nature of the field.
- Capturing evolution: evolution as variation, selection, retention, and diffusion; HRD viewed as a system.
- Scientometrics and the social network approach: graph theory as the basis for studying a field through its publications.
- Three networks: co-citation, co-authorship, and keyword co-occurrence, each with what it can show about a scholarly community.
- Recent findings: results from co-citation studies, co-authorship networks of AHRD conference papers and journals, keyword networks, and topic models of the four AHRD journals.
- Conclusion and Q&A: the structures left in publications are empirical evidence of how the HRD paradigm has changed.
Tools and materials
- A 58-slide deck.
- An interactive timeline of HRD history, also exported as a web page.
- Network maps and topic model figures from my own bibliometric studies of HRD journals and conference papers.