I love old books

September 29, 2023

I love old books. My father worked with old books as a librarian at Princeton and Yale, so there’s something familiar and calming about them for me. When I was in high school, I stumbled upon and read B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (published in 1948), which fueled my interest in psychology, organizations, and community. This affection for old books was part of my motivation for writing a post in the Academy of Human Resource Development’s monthly newsletter on “Uncovering the Value of HRD’s Seminal Writings.” The newsletter was published earlier this week and I thought I’d share it here as well.

Here’s the post:

When I took Neal Chalofsky’s course on the Foundations of Human and Organizational Learning at the George Washington University (GW) in 2014, I remember being frustrated reading seminal texts in the field of HRD. I thought, “Why are we reading these old books and articles instead of the most recent, cutting-edge research in the field?” 

I had a lot to learn about the value of seminal writings.

Now, nearly a decade later as a faculty member at Louisiana State University, we are in the process of moving buildings and getting rid of some old books in our office. Many of these books belonged to AHRD Hall-of-Famer Ed Holton and longtime AHRD member, Reid Bates. Among the collection, I found a first edition copy of the “Training and Development Handbook” (1967) by the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD), the organization from which AHRD was born. Somewhat embarrassingly, the only name I recognized in the handbook was Donald Kirkpatrick. I found a first edition of “The Handbook of Human Resource Development” (1984) edited by Leonard Nadler, who founded the first HRD graduate program in the United States at GW in the 1970s and coined the term “human resource development” at an ASTD conference in 1969. I was proud to find chapters by two of my former GW professors, Mike Marquardt and Neal Chalofsky, in that first handbook.

As I dusted off more of the books, I found several volumes in a series called “New Perspectives in Organizational Learning, Performance, and Change” edited by the late Jerry W. Gilley, which included “Philosophy and Practice of Organizational Learning, Performance, and Change” (2001) by Gilley, Peter Dean, and Laura Bierema – back when AHRD’s Past-President was in her early years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. This was next to another book in the series: “Critical Issues in HRD” by Ann M. Gilley, Jamie Callahan, and Laura Bierema. Harbingers of great scholarship to come.

After reading through chapters of these and other books in the collection, I have come to appreciate the value of these seminal texts for our scholarship today. Of course, they are not the only seminal texts in our field and are not without criticism. They were mostly written by U.S. American white men and talked overwhelmingly about performance and the financial reasons to develop people. But I think there are a few key reasons that today’s HRD scholars and students should consider revisiting our field’s seminal writings. 

First, they capture the historical development of the field. Without these readings, we can’t understand the historical legacy and the roots of our intellectual development.

Second, they show all the hard work of so many great scholars to bring us to where we are today. The field was in its infancy in the 70s and 80s. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the tireless and expansive work of so many excellent scholars and students. And for you students out there, the famous Kirkpatrick model started as his doctoral dissertation. Students should be encouraged that their dissertations have the potential to become the seminal texts of the future. 

Third, but certainly not last, they give us a glimpse of what is yet to come. Reflecting on the past is an excellent way to envision the future. 

Reading seminal texts still fills me with a mix of emotions: fascination, frustration, and curiosity. While I encourage you all to sign up for email alerts from our four AHRD-sponsored journals, so you can keep up with the latest trailblazing research in our field, I want to recommend that all of us take time to reflect on the foundations of Human Resource Development. One starting point is Darlene Russ-Eft’s (2016) piece in Advances in Developing Human Resources on “Controversies that Shaped the Field of Human Resource Development.” Another place to begin is the most senior HRD scholar you meet at the upcoming AHRD conference in Washington, D.C. in February 2024. I hope you consider joining and having a candid conversation with those most senior among us about how we got where we are today and where we might consider going from here. 

There is so much to learn about moving forward from reflecting on the past. Onward.