Abstract
The world is experiencing significant, largely economic and
sociotechnical, induced change. These induced changes are meaningful
with a function of people taking collective actions around common
beliefs. These changes are more than jargon, cliché and hyperbole, and
they are effecting major transformations. These transformations will
impact on how human resources are developed and we need to be able to
forecast its effects. In order to produce such forecasts, HRD needs to
become more predictive - to develop the ability to understand how human
capital systems and organizations will behave in future. Further
development of systems models is required to allow such predictions to
be made. Critical to the development of such models will be to
understand that linear epistemology cannot be the dominant epistemology
of practice and that dynamic complexity of challenges confronted by HRD
professionals in their daily research and practice requires a nonlinear
epistemology of practice, rather than reductive or linear thinking or
processes of normal science. Although the adoption of a systems approach
to research in HRD is not novel, methodologies and conceptual approaches
underlying it use are not very well developed. In this paper, a
stakeholder analysis methodology that was developed as a novel method in
conducting systems approach research in human resource development,
public policy and agricultural education is described.