Occupational professionalization: A research in human resources management area

With the development of information society processes and the effects of globalization, the qualifications of the workforce that are required have undergone a radical change. Determining the skills and abilities that are necessary for jobs, hiring, and keeping the people around that have them has become quite difficult today. Human Resources Management (HRM) is the placement of employees, as well as responsible for a wide range of activities such as orientation, remuneration, personnel affairs, performance evaluation and training. For this reason, the importance of occupational professionalization in the field of HR has also increased. Professionalization is a social process for the development of the competence of a profession, and several approaches in the literature address this issue. The best-knowns of these approaches are quality, process and power approaches. The process approach argues that for the profession to become professional it must historically go through certain stages, while according to the qualification approach, the profession must have some qualifications to be defined as professional. The power approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of the trust that professional professions create in society while maintaining their economic relations. In this study, occupational professionalization in the field of HRM was studied in terms of process, quality and power approaches. In the social context we live in, the subject has been discussed in a theoretical framework covering professional competencies and historical development in order to identify, evaluate and provide information that will enable them to understand the field of HRM. Thus, as a professional field, it has been tried to understand how HRM has been implemented in practice, what qualities it has, and at what stage of the professionalization process. For this purpose, a field study was conducted based on data obtained through in-depth interviews from 15 HR managers working in companies operating in Antalya. Interview data were analyzed using the descriptive analysis technique. The data obtained were handled under the headings of education, ethics, socialization, autonomy, organization, legitimacy, identity, status and prestige, and how the participants interpreted the professional professionalization of their field was evaluated. In the first part of the research, a conceptual framework was created about the concept of the profession, the relationship between profession, individual, and society, as well as occupational professionalization, and approaches to professionalization were discussed within the framework of the sociology of professions. In the second section, available literature on the relationship between HRM and professionalization is presented. In the third chapter, the findings of the interviews with human resources managers and specialist were analyzed and interpreted in order to understand occupational professionalization in the field of HRM in terms of quality and process aspects.