Beyond Human Resources to Post-Human Resources

Is it really true that, as the Roman philosopher Seneca famously said in antiquity, "It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters"? (TE 2013) This popular view on quality can be contrasted with an opposing view by John Ruskin, who wrote that "the strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it." (TE 2013a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human resources (in relation to quantity and quality) are neither possible (nor impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Of course, this questioning of the opposing views on human resources does not imply that the study of quantity and quality is worthless, or that those fields (related to human resources)like demographics, human resource management, labor economics, development studies, environmental migration, modernization, organizational studies, sustainable growth, and so onare unimportant. (WK 2013) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human resources in regard to the dialectic relationship between quantity and quality (especially, though not solely, in the context of demographics)while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the post-human theory of demography) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters. This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human resources in relation to quantity and quality (especially, though not solely, in the context of demographics) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate.