The means chosen to achieve a certain end has become an end it itself—thus
undermining the achieving of the purpose for which it was designed.
The present author’s study of the personnel management occupation (Watson
1977 ) set the work of personnel managersWrmly in this context of handling conXicts
and contradictions in social life, at the societal, organizational, and departmental
level. The personnel occupation was shown to have come about, not because of the
‘system needs’ which required it (which would be a functionalist analysis) but—
following Weber’s focus upon the interaction of ideas and interests in processes of
social change (Bendix 1966 )—because particular historical actors came forward and
created an occupation to handle some of the unintended consequences of processes
of rationalization. Personnel management is thus shown to be both an outcome
of the rationalization process of social life and employment and a reactor to it—in
the sense that it takes on many of the tensions, conXicts, contradictions, and
ambiguities that come about in the modern bureaucratized enterprise.
New institutionalism is a development of broadly Weberian thinking. It is
increasingly being applied to HRM (Purcell 1999 ), in part to counter an over-
emphasis on economic rationality of the ‘resource-based view’ of theWrm which
plays a key role in economic/strategic management analyses (Boxall 1996 ). The new
institutionalism follows Weber in putting alongside economic rationality factors
(zweckrationalita ̈t), normative or value-based (wertrationalita ̈t) factors. It puts
particular emphasis on the various pressures on organizations to become similar
to each other. Paauwe and Boselie ( 2003 and this Handbook, Chapter 9 ), for
example, suggest ways in which the three institutional mechanisms inXuencing
organizational decision-making identiWed in DiMaggio and Powell’s ( 1983 ) seminal
article can be related to HRM. Coercive mechanisms include trade unions and
government legislation; mimetic mechanisms include the imitating of the strategies
of competitors and the various management fads and fashions; normative mech-
anisms include such things as occupational HR training and links through HR
managers’ professional bodies (Paauwe and Boselie 2003 : 60 ). And Boxall and
Purcell point to the pursuit of ‘social legitimacy’ (one of the ‘three key goals for
HRM’, 2003 : 33 ; cf. Lees 1997 ) as a signiWcant factor pressing organizations to
become similar to each other.
- 3 The Marxian Strand
The notion of unintended consequences of deliberate human actions that plays a
key role in the Weberian strand of thinking also arises in Marxian thinking in the
notion of the contradictions within capitalism. Modern institutions of employ-
ment, of which ‘HRM’ is a part, are central to the capitalist mode of production.
But these institutions are part and parcel of a class system, given that they are based
on a logic in which a capital-owning class, through a managed ‘labor process,’
organization theory and hrm 117