HRM AND THE ETHICS OF COMMODIFIED WORK 113cannot equate the utility of a poorly sheltered person who has a poor diet,
but who has become inured to her circumstances, with that of a person who
is well-fed and well-sheltered, even if her satisfaction levels are identical. Sen
deliberately refuses to provide a concrete specification of what capabilities are
to be pursued, for he believes that what counts as a relevant capability will
depend on the context in question and needs to be determined by dialogue on
the part of those on whom such accounts of the good affects. He is concerned
to rebut any suggestion that the capabilities approach is overly prescriptive
(Alkire 2002: 54–6).
One obvious area where such an approach could be applied is to the benefits
of work. By thinking of work as a site for the development of capabilities
rather than merely as a means to the end of acquiring income, one is in effect
developing an account of meaningful work. Meaningful work, or at least one
form of it, would, following Sen’s model, become that work in which one was
able to develop capabilities.
If Sen is correct about the importance of the development of capabilities—
which broadly speaking I think he is—and his framework is applicable to the
context of work, then it follows that we should think of work as a site for the
development of capabilities. On this model, then, it is a mistake to conceive
of work as merely a means to the acquisition of wealth. Instead, the correct
approach recognizes work as a non-instrumental source of well-being.
From all of this we might conclude that one responsibility of both employ-
ers and employees is to eschew regarding work as merely a means to income,
but rather to view it as a site for the development of capabilities. How this
might play out in terms of actual social policy is another matter, but for the
moment it is enough to note that considerations of the meaningfulness of
work occupy a central role in any legitimate ethics of work.
Commercial moral hazards and HRM
What implications do the findings in the previous sections have specifically
for HRM? What I have outlined is a set of three moral hazards that arise
directly as a result of the commercial framework within which work is set
in modern market economies. By ‘moral hazards’ I mean any circumstance
in which agents have an incentive, by virtue of those circumstances and in
conjunction with their own desire to pursue their advantage, to undertake
some course of action that is morally harmful to someone else involved in that
domain. Obviously, to pursue this approach is to adopt a pluralist as opposed
to a ‘unitarist’ approach to IR. While unitarists do not accept that there is
any legitimate conflict of interest between employers and employees, pluralists