ETHICAL BASIS FOR HRM PROFESSIONALISM 169fiduciary relation, distributive justice, professional detachment, and whistle-
blowing. In favour of the professionalization argument and associated pro-
posal is the consideration that organizations are ideally the important delivery
vehicles of normatively construed needs-satisfiers like dignified work, and of
ethical goals. HR practitioners have a key moral obligation to respect, and see
that the organization enforces, state law and its own ethical norms and codes,
especially in the area of justice. This social justice requirement is at present
largely enforced informally.
Professionalization would underline the fact that although senior HR prac-
titioners are following CEOs on most issues, they can, should, and do refuse
some requests from them and also from unions and outsiders, and this paral-
lels the lawyer’s and doctor’s autonomy. A clearer position within the ethical
organization would need to be spelled out, and a more ‘social ethics-friendly’
theory of the corporation specified along concessional model lines.
By professionalizing and specifying an interdisciplinary social policy, jus-
tice, and corporate governance curriculum grounded in the alternative cor-
porate governance models, and a binding enforced code of ethics and code of
conduct for all practitioners, HRM would gain in status and moral account-
ability. This might actually diminish one of the main ethical hazards of pro-
fessionalization: that it would entail more responsibility, but no increased
power. The danger that it would be subverted in the business sector (as indi-
vidual accounting and law professionals have been in Enron-type fiascos) by
incorporation into huge globalized transnational HR consulting firms, with
no ethical allegiance to any particular state or region, is not increased by
professionalization. If anything, it might be reduced by the proposed changes.
More positively, it would guide HR practitioners in their role as the central
clearing house between the top and bottom of the organizational structure.
There are other areas where the conflict of justice, organizational perfor-
mance, and their personal morality is manifested. Professionalization might
help to clarify their ethical focus in some of these areas (Macklin 2001). The
USA and UK cases suggest that to some degree it is within the power of HR
practitioners to put their own house in order, and then apply for recognition
from outside.
Against the feasibility of professionalization de facto in Anglo-American
contexts is the current economic and power dependency often presently writ-
ten into their employment contracts, even at senior levels of HRM. Especially
in the business sector which is arguably the least morally constrained sector
because it permits pursuit of any ethically permissible good for profit, they
have at present no area of presumptive ultimate authority. Even when they
have a seat at the high table where decisions on strategic matters are made by
leadership groups acting as the organizational ‘intellect and will’, mere pro-
fessionalization without a change in their organizational power and authority
might make things worse. HR practitioners would bear the heavy burden of