Exploring methodologically in human resource management in favour of decent work

I make a case for methodology and wish to come out of usual boxes
I try to come to this conference every year for a few specific reasons: it is the conference where I have heard the largest diversity of national cases and examples of how work and employment are being studied, understood, framed and practised across the world. Rarely to I hear cases on countries like Uzbekistan elsewhere in the western world. I learn much from this diversity.
Second, we are being welcome by law scholars who are very onto other disciplines and how they conceptualised, understand and discuss work.
Every year I come here to test new propositions, and to talk about innovation I attempt in my research on work and employment.
By now, the United nations’ 2030 sustainable development (SD) agenda is recognised as a compass and framework to address the grand challenges facing different groups of social actors as they navigate across a socio-ecological transition. This framework has been equally embraced within management and industrial relations education and learning. While in the realms of work and employment, the agenda’s 8th goal focuses on decent work and economic growth, there is currently much room to reflect upon the ways in which academic research and learning contribute to a collective endeavour in favour of more sustainable practices in the workplace and beyond.
In line with this claim, I argue that it is possible to experiment with and propose new methods to study decent work in a conscious attempt to contribute to social impact. I draw from two projects in which I conducted research respectively with an action-research approach and film-based sociology. I explain how these approaches have benefited my intent to conduct fieldwork, given an explicit ontological focus on workers’ experiences at workers and vulnerability. I present two vignettes that help contextualise my two projects. The first vignette will focus on my action-research project where I was required to support a trade union confederation as it embarked on an internal process to reflect upon its EDI-oriented policies. This union was analysed as a non-profit employer in the research. The second vignette provides some of the main findings and implications of creating a documentary as research medium and dissemination material. Finally, I discuss the challenges facing the critical researcher trying to innovate methodologically in HRM and industrial relations while also highlighting the benefits of an exploratory approach in favour of decent work.