The Political Economy of HRM in Nigerian Parastatals: Elite Capture, Bureaucratic Resistance, and Reform Paradoxes

This study employs a political economy lens to examine HRM in Nigerian parastatals, theorising and empirically demonstrating how elite capture, bureaucratic resistance, and structural paradoxes undermine HRM reform initiatives and reproduce dysfunctional people management practices across Nigeria's public enterprise landscape. The persistent failure of HRM reform programmes in Nigerian parastatals, despite multiple government-led initiatives, remains inadequately explained by mainstream HRM and public management theories. The study employs an intensive multi-case qualitative design across six federal parastatals in Abuja, Lagos, and Port Harcourt, drawing on 72 semi-structured interviews with parastatal board members, HR executives, civil service union officials, reform programme managers, and frontline employees over an 18-month fieldwork period. Thick ethnographic description is combined with process-tracing and historical institutional analysis spanning three decades of reform cycles. Political Economy Theory, Neo-Institutional Theory, and Critical HRM Theory provide the multi-theoretic framework. Findings reveal four recurring mechanisms through which HRM reforms are subverted: elite patronage network penetration of HR appointment processes, bureaucratic resistance through procedural opacity, legislative mandate ambiguity exploited by entrenched interests, and reform design-implementation disconnects arising from political compromise. The study theorises these mechanisms as a Reform Paradox Configuration, in which reform efforts generate surface-level compliance while deepening underlying HRM dysfunction. Original contributions include a Political Economy HRM Model for African Parastatals, a Reform Subversion Mechanism Taxonomy, and a policy framework for politically informed HRM reform design. Keywords: Political Economy, HRM Reform, Parastatals, Elite Capture, Nigeria.