Download Towards a grown-up and critical academic HRM

Towards a grown-up and critical academic HRM - and the need to grow
out of infantile ‘hard and soft HRM’, ‘rhetoric and reality’ and
functionalist habits to engage critically with the adult world of
employment management
Tony Watson
Nottingham Business School, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU,
[email protected]
An aspect of managerial and organisational life that cries out for critical analysis is that
of employment management: the element of an organisation’s managerial apparatus that
deals specifica lly with issues relating to the corporate ‘input’ of human labour and
initiative. This type of activity, once called ‘personnel management’, is now widely
referred to as the field of HRM or ‘human resource management’. However, we get an
immediate problem with the academic ‘field’ of HRM which, from the start, questions
how ‘grown up’ an activity it is. This is the confusion over its very name – indeed its
very conception of what it is. The main confusion is that over whether ‘HRM’ is a special
and relative ly new type of employment management (which is different or ‘more
strategic’ than personnel management) or whether it is the something much broader something synonymous with what has just been referred to as employment management.
To avoid the type of confusion where we can find ourselves too easily and nonsensically
talking of ‘HRM as a type of HRM’, the more generic conception of human resource
management, and that alone, will be adopted here. It is felt that this would be a first step
towards some growing up on the part of this confused and confusing branch of
management studies. It also acknowledges the fact that the managing of work
organisations generally and necessarily involves utilising and shaping the human
resources of knowledge, capability and effort that people bring to the work situation.
Although the best way forward might be to drop the HRM expression and replace it with
‘employment management’, this is not likely to happen. If the term is going to be used,
we might most usefully conceptua lise HRM as the element of managerial work which is
concerned with acquiring, developing and dispensing with the efforts, skills and
capabilities of an organisation’s workforce and maintaining organisational relationships
within which these human resource can be utilised to enable the organisation to continue
into the future within the social, political and economic context in which it exists.
Defining our area of study in this way helps us to proceed with investigating the various
ways in which employment management is carried out in practice and with theorising
about how and why different practices are followed in different organisational
circumstances. It is also to recognise, from the start, that we are looking at an activity
closely implicated in the broad ways in which social and economic life in modern
societies is organised. This is vital to achieving a critical style of management studies.
At this point a conception of critical management and organisation studies will be set out
and just one part of this is the recognition that one cannot have a critical analysis of
HRM, in the sense of studies with a potential to inform debates about how the social and
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working world is organised, without relating HRM to broader patterns of culture, power
and inequality.
To help clear away some of the tendencies of current academic debate which preclude
moving in this critical direction, attention is now paid to
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The hard-soft HRM delusion. It will be suggested that the widely used hard-soft
distinction be dropped. It is utterly unhelpful as an analytical tool. This is necessary in
part because it confuses variations in intellectual or academic emphasis with
variations in managerial practice. It originated as a distinction between two different
intellectual emphases (‘Michigan’ and ‘Harvard’) identified in the American
academic literature but is often used, in practice, to distinguish between relatively
tough and relatively tender managerial regimes. More importantly, however, the
distinction must be rejected because it ignores the political-economic context of
managerial practices. Work organisations operate within an industrial capitalist
context, part of the logic of which is the employment of human beings as a means of
furthering corporate purposes which, in turn, support the continuation of a social
order which privileges capital-owning interests. In effect, in an industrial capitalist
political economy, there is an option of following either hard-hard policies and
practices (applying tough and direct controls to serve corporate interests) or hard-soft
policies and practices (applying developmental and indirect controls to serve
corporate interests). What is not an option is a soft-soft approach – one that turns
away from the prioritising of corporate interests to prioritising humanistic concerns.
The HRM literature tends to use the hard-soft distinction naively to imply that this is
an empirical possibility. But it is not.
The ‘rhetoric and reality’ tendency. An almost standard ploy of academic HRM
writers wanting to write critically is for them to look for gaps between what they call
‘reality’ and what they call ‘rhetoric’. Serious attempts are being been made by
various researchers, typically outside the ‘HRM’ camp, to use the concept of rhetoric
in a neutral manner to analyse the way social actors use language to persuade other
social actors of the validity of particular arguments. However, HRM writers
frequently use the term ‘rhetoric’ in its ‘everyday’ pejorative sense as a form of
language use which has little s ubstance and is mainly concerned to mislead and
impress its audience through the use of clever linguistic tricks. The ‘pseudo-critical’
element of the HRM literature tends to treat ‘rhetoric’ as little more than ‘false
claims’ about changes in managerial practice, claims which the HRM academic is
able to debunk by investigating the ‘reality’ of what is ‘actually going on’. The
immaturity of this lies in the sad state of affairs where HRM proceeds as if the
‘linguistic turn’ had never occurred in the social sciences and it will be argued here
that a properly critical analysis of HRM would involve examining the various
discourses that are drawn upon in the employment management sphere and how the
discursive resources taken from these are deployed in the exercise of power.
The regression to functionalism. If attention is to be paid to how ideas and discursive
resources are deployed in employment management it is vital to look inside the ‘black
box’ of the employing organisation as a system which converts ‘inputs’ into
‘outputs’. It will be argued that this is the underlying and functionalist model of much
standard HRM research and writing – functionalism being something that sociologists
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and organisational theorists turned away from decades ago. Much more attention
needs to be paid the fact that human resourcing strategies are outcomes of human
interpretations, conflicts, confusions, guesses and rationalisations, albeit with these
aspects of human agency operating within a context of societal and politicaleconomic circumstances.
To illustrate how a more critical and mature style of social scientific analysis might be
applied to HRM, a framework, summarised here in Fig 1, will be outlined. This focuses
on the various factors and processes that lead to the adoption of different ideal type styles
of employment management in organisations.
Fig 1 Choices and constraints in the shaping of organisational human resourcing
practices
Global political-economic patterns, inequalities
and discursive practices
Managers (as officers of employing organisations) interactively interpreting,
in the light of their values, personal and micropolitical interests and their
perceptions of technological, market and other contingencies, the extent to
which employee constituencies create unce rtainty for the long-term survival
of the organisation and tending to choose either
Low commitment, direct
control, human
resourcing practices
when employee
constituencies perceived
as creating low strategic
uncertainty
High commitment,
indirect control, human
resourcing practices when
employee constituencies
perceived as creating high
strategic uncertainty
And this model will be applied to the case of Moddens Foods where we see factions in
the company’s senior management arguing for alternative directions for organisational
human resourcing in the business, with these different approaches being both influenced
by and contributing to patterns of inequality and exploit ation, some of these being at a
global level. These are matters to which a grown-up and critical style of HRM analysis
must pay attention.
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