The rise of personal development training in organizations: A historical and institutional perspective on workplace training programs

This dissertation explains why the content of employee training has expanded in the 20th century from specific-technical training to include a wide range of personal development training programs such as leadership, creativity and career management. Given that provision of personal development training does not seem to follow an instrumental logic in the sense of technical rationality, human-capital and technology-based arguments can not adequately explain the rise of such training in organizations. Based upon the institutional perspective of organizations, I propose that the historical rise of the participatory citizenship model of organization drives the expansion of personal development training. The participatory citizenship model consists of two dimensions. One dimension is that individual employees (especially middle management) are empowered and regarded as the main source of organizational rationality rather than "adjunct of machines" or rule-followers. The second dimension is that organizations incorporate diffused demand from the state and society as corporate citizens rather than simply production/service centers. The rise of the participatory model is accompanied by the decline of the bureaucracy and community models, which emphasize training in specific-technical and human relations skills rather than personal development training.;This study demonstrates the impact of the participatory organizational model on personal development training at three levels: ideological, organizational, and cross-national. The empirical analyses explain both the historical changes and contemporary diversity in employee training. I combine qualitative and quantitative methods to test my core argument from different angles. The former involves fieldwork in one Fortune 100 company and an analysis of historical documents, and the latter includes a systematic content analysis of a major practitioner-oriented journal in personnel management, Personnel Journal , between 1928 and 1996, and statistical modeling of survey data based on national representative samples of organizations and individuals.;This study sheds light from a sociological perspective on the classic question raised by human capital theorists, "why do firms provide general training?", and at a broader level, probes into the fundamental aspects of historical organizational change. It also provides a critical bridge between the two fields of organization theory and strategic human resources management.