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.
References
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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”