156 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
brought into existence as means to the ‘higher’ more ultimate ends of ethics
and politics, use resources which constrain realization of the ends themselves.
Public sector decision-making in a modern democracy therefore ideally
seeks the achievement of the common good by all citizens, and should set legal
and other boundaries within which professions, businesses, NGOs, and non-
profit organizations operate. It has in some ways a broader legislative mandate
allowing it to be directive of all of the domains, if only in some respects which
we will examine presently. The view that business requires a social remit is
supported in the business corporation case by the so-called ‘dual concession’
theory of the corporation (Bottomley 1990, 1997) and Dine (2000, 2005),
and their ‘constitutional’ model of the corporation. Broadly, the state is seen
as granting authority to constitute and then operate a corporation for any
permissible purpose provided that it has fair procedures, does no harm, and
does some social good.
Professions
Professions may be understood as constituting a hybrid sector between public
and private, run autonomously in some ways, following a set of cognitive
and moral norms via codes of ethics and conduct. From a teleological and
virtue ethics perspective, the professions, like the public sector, pledge to
provide certain specific public goods and human needs of individuals (Brock
1998; Koehn 1994; Oakley and Cocking 2001). In the paradigm cases of law
and medicine, the profession of law is targeted on the provision of justice
for individuals and medicine is targeted towards the provision of health for
individuals. Professions can either be seen as being an autonomous sector
serving the public good, or belonging within the public sector funded by taxes
to threshold levels of service provision. Unlike private sector organizations,
professions should meet morally warranted individual needs in a distinctive
manner. The idea is ancient and has changed over time as have most social
constructs, but the core values, goods, and needs (ethically warranted wants)
remain relevant to society today (Alkire 2000; Bok 1995; Brown 1991; Finnis
1983; Walzer 1994).
NAVE and the applied knowledge requirement
There is also a broad expectation currently that a profession applies a body of
systematic knowledge to need satisfaction. The candidates for the more spe-
cific kind of systematic knowledge include: theoretical, experimentally tested,