A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Human Resource Management

Irena Grugulis

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781446200803
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473987630
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Engaging and entertaining in equal measure, Human ResourceManageme n t is a book about work, the people who do it and the way they are managed (and mismanaged). Raising issues that are often neglected in typical HRM texts, such as work intensification and unemployment; it explores the realities of work, workers, and the communities that are affected by HRM policy and practice. Grugulis draws on current research to provide a critical and reflective overview of the key debates in HRM today. Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ' Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap ' series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. Suitable for students of HRM, professionals working in organizations and anyone with an interest in the nature of human resources.

1 Human Resource Management

Work is important. Not only does it consume a large part of our adult lives, but also the jobs we hold influence the people who we meet, where we live, what hobbies we get to enjoy, the number of children we have (seriously!) and the social class that sociologists ascribe to us. So a book which looks at what people do at work, what is done to them and what happens as a result is itself pretty important.

That is what this book is about. It’s called Human Resource Management (or HRM) because that is the acronym which is currently popular but that does not mean that this book will limit its perspective to management, or even that it takes the management perspective. An essential feature of this series is that the books published in it are critical; which is great because frankly, when you look at HRM it is the critical aspects that are most interesting. Of course this book will deal with some of the key employment practices like strategy, team-working, empowerment, skills and training and pay, among others, but it will not insult your intelligence by trying to convince you that any or all of these are the solution to every organisational ill, nor that these practices always work, no matter how unpropitious the conditions, nor that they make workers happy. HR practices do work sometimes. In some firms. With some people. But not all the time with everyone. And finding the reasons for those differences or explaining why practices don’t work is far more constructive than pretending that they do. This book will also deal with the dark side of HRM: redundancies and discrimination, without euphemisms and without pretending that they are aberrations, one-off exceptions, unlikely to be repeated or soon to be outgrown, because very often they aren’t.

This means that this book is not one of the Happy HRM books that fill the bestseller shelves in airports and railway stations, and which claim to offer, in evangelically couched rhetoric, transformational practices that will change your organisation for the better. Ultimately, these books aren’t really describing management, or HRM, or work; they are doing the twenty-first century equivalent of peddling snake oil – miracle cures for all organisational ills. The problem with these Happy HRM books is that they don’t really get us anywhere. The ‘evidence’ they offer is enthusiasm, anecdote and assertion. And the practices they advocate are backed up by evangelical rhetoric rather than reasoned argument. More worryingly, there is no room for debate. OK, so that’s a very academic point of view but when academic studies are well designed they can tell us whether a practice works, and why, what its limitations are, where it is completely ineffective and (occasionally) what can be done about all this. Happy HRM, by contrast, is a take-it-or-leave-it approach. It’ll work because we’re all fired up to do it, all enthusiasts, all believers, all cheerleaders. If and when it doesn’t there’s no real explanation (other than the organisational equivalent of your faith not being strong enough). Good studies provide building blocks which help us understand more about people and organisations, just as studying medicine provides evidence about the human body. Happy HRM is simply a question of faith. If it works it’s magic. If it doesn’t you’re lost with no guide to the path.

The aim of this book, by contrast, is to explore and explain the truth of what happens at work. It is not being written to market a new HR practice, nor popularise a consultancy firm, nor will it make you feel inspired, enthused or overjoyed (though obviously it will be nice if you are). I hope that this approach means that, if you ever do become a manager, you will be a better, more thoughtful and more well-informed one. It should certainly enable you to understand the realities of the workplace.

This chapter sets the scene by considering what HRM is. It is also the theory chapter. And for everyone who flinched at the word theory –Don’t Panic. It isn’t difficult, it doesn’t take long and it should more than repay any attention you give it because while practices tend to change (and in HRM they tend to change all the time) theories, if they are any good, are pretty resilient. So while knowing about something like managing diversity or empowerment or performance related pay will keep you going for however long the fad lasts before being re-named, re-structured and re-vised, knowing a few of the theories behind the HR practices will enable you to assess any others that come along, to understand why problems arise and to chuck a few phrases into essays that are guaranteed to impress your tutors. So if you’re going to skip anything (and transform a very short book into a really amazingly titchy one) then keep the theory and skip something else.

What is HRM?

So what is HRM anyway? Is it something special, a particular (and particularly sophisticated) set of practices that are linked to strategy or is it just the personnel department going through a bit of re-branding and changing the sign on the door? If it is something different, a qualitatively distinct approach to managing people, then a certain number of features are key. Storey’s (1995: 5) definition is that:

Human resource management is a distinctive approach to employment management which seeks to achieve competitive advantage through the strategic deployment of a highly committed and capable workforce, using an integrated array of cultural, structural and personnel techniques.

He also provides a table of key beliefs and assumptions, strategic qualities, the critical role of managers and key levers (1995: 6) (see Table 1.1).

Source: Storey, J. 1995. ‘Human resource management: still marching on or marching out?’ In Human Resource Management: A Critical Text, edited by J. Storey. London and New York: Routledge. p.6. Reproduced by permission of Cengage Learning EMEA Ltd.

This is a distinctive approach to managing and being managed that aligns both human and strategic aspects of work. Way back in the mists of time (well, actually the 1980s and 1990s) this was an important, or at least a much rehearsed, debate. Gone were the days of demarcation, fixed job grades and negotiations with trade unions and welcome to the Brave New World of the ‘can do’ outlook with highly committed workers going beyond contract to please customers, harmonised terms and conditions, learning organisations and individual contracts. This was a whole new relationship between workers and management centring upon harmony and trust.

Of course it didn’t really happen like that. In some (mainly very large) companies there were changes in the way people were managed, elegantly documented by researchers like John Storey (1992) which were called HRM. But there were also plenty of firms which had taken the HR approach for many years (including John Lewis, and Marks and Spencer) but which labelled it personnel management and even more which changed the label but not the practices. So empirically the distinction between HRM and non-HRM was never clear cut, yet despite this HRM was hailed as both new and different. Part of the reason for that is that innovation is always interesting and continuities tend to attract far less publicity than change. I don’t think any newspaper or academic journal is ever going to boast a headline along the lines of ‘Shock News: Employment Practices stay the Same’. Novelty is attractive and novelty sells so we exaggerate the extent to which things change. Far too many academics (and even more journalists) assume that history starts the moment they set foot in a firm, that whatever they are told is new, is new and that anything that happens after that moment is entirely attributable to whatever it was that was new. It’s a pretty naïve approach. But talk to anyone who has been working for about 20 years in the same place (amazingly this is still the average job tenure in Britain) and they will more than likely tell you that it has all happened before – different label but the same idea. Pay very close attention and they might even tell you what happened.

Frankly, it is not particularly clear whether the first academics to write about HRM (Beer et al., 1984) were putting it forward as an idea to think about or a prescriptive model for the way managers might approach the people they employed. Whichever it was, HRM soon became known as a theory of work, a model for managing and a description of practice; terminology which had a significant impact but which was not necessarily particularly accurate (Noon, 1992). By the start of the 1990s, some writers on HRM were claiming credit for the demise of personnel management (which hadn’t happened), massive workplace change (which had happened in some places, but only some and even there might not have been so very different to changes which had gone before) and the decline of union membership (a genuine and dramatic social change which had little to do with HRM. In some US companies, employers did take a ‘bouquets and brickbats’ approach to discouraging unions, often beating up activists while providing nice HR practices for employees so they felt no need to organise, but it is not clear how widespread this was, and in Britain unionised organisations were more likely to have HR practices).

Needless to say there was a huge discussion about this and researchers delighted in pointing out the incongruities in the debate. Most of the elements of practice and approach that HRM valued had also been valued by personnel management and the only reason the two areas did not look identical was that empirical descriptions of personnel management were compared to aspirational prescriptions for HRM; workplace realities contrasted with ideal and idealised situations (hardly a fair basis for comparison). To complicate matters still further, if HRM was a particular thing or group of things, no-one could agree on exactly what those things were: A link to strategy? Managing culture? Empowering workers? Harmonising terms and conditions? Getting rid of trade unions or welcoming them in as partners?

Anyway, it wasn’t a particularly interesting debate and it went on for years. I apologise for bothering you with it but it does help to explain the approach I’m taking to HRM in this book because I am not doing any of that. I promise that at no stage will I break off and ask you whether HRM really is different from personnel management or ask you to describe the differences. Because if I did we would have difficulty getting beyond the limitations imposed. Definitions of HRM vary. Whichever one we chose, assuming that we decided that HRM was indeed a distinctive approach to the management of people, we would find that in practice only a tiny minority of firms would conform to all or part of this definition (not all of which would call their practices HRM). Pretty well all of these firms would be large organisations. What we might then do is hope that our readers forgot just how selective our evidence had been and assumed that any conclusions applied to all firms. Alternatively, there is the option that many of the HRM books (including this one) espouse, which is to accept the fact that HRM has become the popular label for anything about work. The authors then write about work as a whole and just label it HRM.

The way I will be using the term HRM is as a synonym for anything to do with work and employment. Or, as Boxall and Purcell (2011: 1) put it:

HRM refers to all those activities associated with the management of work and people in organisations.

Realistically, this is the way it is used in practice in quite a few textbooks and business schools. For many business students, the HRM course is the only module they have on anything to do with work and it would be unfortunate, to say the least, if it made no attempt to engage with the realities of the workplace beyond a favoured few firms and workers. Of course, HRM is not a particularly good synonym for work. The name suggests that people are resources, only worthwhile for the contribution they make to work, and that our focus should be on management (or managing, or managers). There is even a book, titled Human Resources about vampires who ‘take over’ their target organisation and its employees in a very literal way. Personally, I have always refused to have the term HRM in my academic title and (unless and until my employers read this, realise what’s going on and try to insist) I am Professor of Work and Skills. It’s neutral, it doesn’t make it sound as though I am only interested in managers and (other than people actually working in the area) no-one has the foggiest idea what it means. All to the good. However HRM is the title we’ve got so let’s make the best of it.

Unitarism, pluralism and radicalism

Unitarism, pluralism and radicalism are all different frames of reference; ways of looking at the workplace and interpreting what happens (Fox, 1966). Put simply, unitarism is the assumption that management and workers share the same outlook (and that outlook is usually defined by management); pluralism argues that each will have different viewpoints, that such differences are natural, and that managing these differences is what the employment relationship is all about; while radicalism asserts that differences between employers and employees are natural, inevitable and permanent, and they can and should never be reconciled (Edwards, 1995).

One of the main distinguishing features between good and bad studies of HRM, to my mind at least, is the perspective they take on workers and the workplace. At its worst, HRM does have a tendency to be unitarist. In other words, writers assume that there is only one perspective on work and that is management’s. Workers exist to carry out management’s directions (with varying degrees of efficiency) and everybody shares the same goal. The workplace is a team with managers as coaches, urging workers on to greater efforts. So managers can, do and should speak for the whole organisation; they share its interests and their perspective is the only one that is relevant, legitimate or even (in some texts) exists. Mike Noon and Paul Blyton (1997: 1) started the first edition of their book, The Realities of Work with the words:

Here is a modern myth about work. Contemporary workplaces are peopled by high performing, highly committed individuals, bound together into a common cause by a corporate mission enshrined within a strong organisational culture. Workplaces themselves have been ‘transformed’ by new technologies, new forms of organisation and a new generation of management thinking that stresses flexibility, quality, teamwork and empowerment. The workers in these establishments are motivated by ambition and a sense of purpose, and by the individually-designed financial rewards they receive – part of those rewards taking the form of a financial stake in their organisation, either as shares or as profit-related bonuses. Employees are guided by self-interested individualism, and no longer see a role for collective organisation and representation, hence the demise of trade unions.

Sounds lovely and encompasses almost every element of HRM. When it is put like that, you know it’s a myth and I know it’s a myth, but it’s amazing how many books are written on the assumption not only that this is true, but that it describes the vast majority of workplaces.

The key aspect of unitarism is the assumption that only management matters. It is a perspective that allows no room for other views, different interpretations or alternative understandings of the workplace. All conflict is pathologised, since the only reason anyone can have for disagreement is that they are troublemakers, or mentally ill, or both (it is this view that pitches union reps as ‘managers of discontent’). But differences of opinion are a normal and natural part of working life. After all, workplaces may be filled with harmony, inspiration and personal fulfilment through achievement (as the celebratory literature claims) but they are also the sites of bullying, harassment, low wages, dull jobs and a whole range of pressures from managers, suppliers, customers and clients. Globally, more people are killed at work than in war (Taylor, 2009). While each year in Britain 30,000 women are sacked for being pregnant, and this despite the fact that legislation exists to protect them (Hinsliff, 2009). Less dramatically, staff may be told to work long hours of overtime but not claim payment, since this would be ‘disloyal’ to the firm (Grugulis and Vincent, 2009); cleaners may be low paid (Dutton et al., 2008: 119); and, in some firms, managers regularly scream at their subordinates to encourage them to greater efforts (Hochschild, 1983). Under these circumstances surely dissent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Should You Buy This Book?
• 1 Human Resource Management
• 2 Is HRM Strategic?
• 3 Skills and Training
• 4 Pay and Reward
• 5 Flexible Work and Flexible Workers
• 6 Employee Voice
• 7 Service Work
• 8 HRM and the Future of Work
• References
• Index