Last Wednesday, I wrote a brief e-mail to Peter Ackers asking the prolific Industrial Relations academic to interpret which book or article or indeed which critical perspective he would decide holds the most influence in Alan Fox's extended oeuvre.
"Is it Unitarism, Pluralism, or Marxist / Radical? " I asked Prof. Ackers, hoping for enlightenment.
Fast forward an academic week and I finally got that long-awaited reply from Peter Ackers yesterday:
"Hello Alfred, Good to hear from you & pleased you found the idea of neo-pluralism interesting. As you'll see from the bottom reference below, I'm still developing this. The old Industrial Relations Pluralism was fairly narrowly based on conflict between trade unions and employers within the IR system. My 1st IRJ piece in 2002 tried to expand this for contemporary society, where unions are weaker, there are other forms of 'voice' & there are tensions between work & family life. Your blog & question are interesting. All 3 frames are still in play, but within academic Employment Relations the main debate is between neo-pluralism & a radical- pluralism based on Fox's later writing. At the same time, much of management thought is unitarist, assuming simple shared interests between management & employees."
Interesting response from Peter Ackers. More here.
Let's get started!
Today's blog post focuses on a critical perspective of HR in what I will argue is HR's gradual excursion into Zeno's paradox of motion. To illustrate, I will begin with an anecdote. When
I first joined Société Générale as a Data Analyst intern in May 2014, I was invited to a
social event at an illustrious venue in the City - 1 America Square - by the
Head of Human Resources, Benjamin Higgens. This was the first informal
encounter I had with colleagues from other departments in the bank. By the time
I departed from the role in the following year, I had learned enough about
the corporate banking industry to move on; I informed my manager of my intent
to leave, and a letter of termination was issued by a HR clerk in the following
days. Upon reflection, it is easy to see that HR was indeed the first and last
form of representation that I had engaged with. Although, HR is arguably an
integral part of any successful business operating model, its strategic role in
practice is perhaps not as well understood as it could potentially be.
There is a philosophy borrowed from Ancient Greece that may very well have inspired the thinking behind how modern sports analysts observe the reasons behind why some sprinters are so much more
exceptional in comparison to other athletes, particularly across
generations. Zeno’s paradox of motion states that “the fast runner Achilles
can never overtake the slow-moving tortoise” (Wesley, 1980; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). What has this got to
do with changes in HR’s function? Well, likewise, in the field of research, it
is often worthwhile to occasionally take a step back and evaluate the successes
and shortcomings of change in organisations. Why? Because as academics
and practitioners, change does not necessarily signal progression. This blog
post will argue that the evolving role of human resource management (HRM) is suffering
from a gradual excursion into Zeno’s paradox.
As
this blog post explains, using a three-part framework with real-world examples,
there are notable ‘drivers’ of change that have influenced comparatively
less ethical consideration in the workplace, particularly in HR. This
three-part framework corresponds to the ‘TOP’ framework found in the work of Parry
and Bondarouk, where a significant driver of change is the concept of Technology
or e-HRM (Bondarouk et. al., 2017;
Fernandez and Gallardo-Gallardo, 2021;
Shipton, et. al., 2017;
Tansley et. al., 2014;
Poba-Nzaou, et al., 2020).
According to Parry and Bondarouk, much of the change in HR’s function has come
as the result of web or cloud-based innovations that have emerged within the
last 15-20 years. We already know that changes in HR tech over time can be
understood in many ways, for example, through ‘rates of adoption’
(Marler and Parry, 2016;
Poba-Nzaou et al., 2020). Questions of relevance
are important to consider. Has the uptake of HR tech been universal? Through
the prism of impact, or ‘degrees of automation’. Has the uptake of HR tech been
competitive or transformational (Diaz-Fernandez et. al., 2017; Tansley et. al.,
2014)? How do we better
understand the impact of changes in HR’s function through tech innovation?
The
second significant driver of change is Organisational. HR’s function is already a delicate one. It involves coercive and rhetorical
enforcement of the employee-employer relationship with a view to protecting
against the possibility of overt breaches and instances of vicarious liability,
especially in the world of infrastructure finance. The foresight of any repudiation
of a binding contract is a necessary function of HR in the modern workplace. Such rhetorical
enforcement is indicative of a shift to the ‘human resource’ professional approach beyond the realm where formal procedures are merely followed, as opposed to a ‘personnel’ management approach, increasingly as
large corporates seek to guard themselves against expensive
litigation. Take repudiation as one such instance (Cabrelli and Zahn, 2012; Cabrelli and Zahn, 2013) or as in ‘Société
Générale vs Raphael Geys (2012)’,
where the ‘automatic’ and ‘elective’ theories of repudiation are annotated
by the Rt. Hon. Justice, Lord Sumption.
In the postmodern literature on organisational
change, the subject is often thought of as an ontology (Tsoukas and
Chia, 2002).
There are weak ontologies and strong ontologies of becoming in what Chia (1995) emphasises is a transient
reality. But it is how the organisation is philosophically viewed that is of the
essence. Surveillance, particularly ‘hierarchal surveillance’, has been
noted by some HRM academics as an externality that is all too perceivable in
modern HR (Kamoche and Newenham-Kahindi, 2012).
Finally,
the third driver of change is what the TOP framework references as People.
This is akin to shifts in the modes and practices of work (Bowen and Ostroff, 2004; Nwachukwu, 2016).
The
TOP framework suggests that HR’s function is adoptive towards digitisation (Fernandez
and Gallardo-Gallardo, 2021).
However, is this sort of adoption ethical? In a series of qualitative
interviews with over 40 respondents from HR, the evidence that one academic presents suggests that HR actively engages in what this blog post will refer to as the
3D’s of unethical HRM - distancing, depersonalising, and dissembling.
The respondents achieved the 3D’s in their workplace relationships by neutralising
any moral imputes to the role of HR (De Gama et. al., 2012). What does this tell us?
Well, it corroborates the view that the rhetoric of digitisation is not
always ethical (Legge, 2005). As such, concerns with workforce mobility (Bader et.
al., 2023;
Harzing et. al., 2020)
and imbalances in cross-cultural talent identification (McDonnell et. al.,
2023) as an inherent
responsibility of the multi-stakeholder model have possibly led to more
contested outcomes in the present day.
Aside
from the ethicality of the changes I have highlighted in the TOP framework, research
on the acquisition by HR professionals of new competencies coincides quite well
with Zeno’s paradox. According to the interviews which inform Arthur Yueng’s rendition
of the HR competency model (Yueng et. al., 1996),
only 10-15% of HR professionals possess the necessary competencies for a
transition into a new reinvented business function.
This
blog post has shown how HR follows the pattern of Zeno’s paradox. Philosophical
and rhetorical changes in HR’s function are an evolving, and multi-faceted
concept but in a multi-stakeholder model, these changes are usually unaligned
to more rapid changes in business strategy. Using a three-part framework, I
have shown how driving factors in the form of the Parry and Bondarouk framework continue to affect the evolving role of HR in
practice.
Practitioners
should embrace the concept of change in HR’s function, but practice should be
informed by evidence founded in relevant areas of empirical research.
Developing strategies of competitive advantage with respect to wider operating models.
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This post was written by Alfred Anate Mayaki, a student on the MSc in HRM, and was inspired by the work of Peter Ackers in an International Journal of Human Resource Management article entitled: “Neo-pluralism as a theoretical framework for understanding HRM in sub-Saharan Africa”
