Human Resource Management: Ethics and Employment

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP IN EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT 195

to any business undertaking and we are not seeking to cast disdain on their
significance, all the same, greater attention we feel should be given to employee
considerations. Before turning to our two case studies, in the next section
we outline the responsibilities of HRM in the light of economic and other
alternative, significant forms of capital, which we refer to from here onwards
as ‘cultural capital’.

HRM—twin servant to economic capital and

cultural capital

A more helpful way of understanding ethical issues in HRM we suggest is to
see it as involved in the creation, accumulation, and distribution of different
types of capital:economicwealth andculturalwealth. By cultural wealth we
understand it as encompassing a broad range of ethical issues. We view it as
inclusive of a variety of distinctive types of capital other than economic capital
such as:

educational achievement,


cultural achievement,


social status,


social reputation,


social respect, and


symbolic power.

This definition of cultural capital is consistent with the work by the late
sociologist and interpretive researcher, Pierre Bourdieu. Without going into
detail, the following paragraphs provide an overview of his work to assist the
reader with assessing his relevance for ethical analysis and reasoning. We will
identify the relevance of his approach for inquiry on ethical issues and review
some of the major critiques. Then we explain his concept of fields and their
resources of economic and cultural capital (Pinnington 2002).
In management and organization studies, there has been comparatively
substantial uptake of theories and concepts from Bourdieu’s contemporaries,
notably Foucault and to a lesser extent, Derrida. Much of this interest appears
to be related to the ‘linguistic turn’ in progressive management studies as has
been demonstrated in areas such as narrative and discourse research (Boje
2001; Hardy, Lawrence, and Grant 2005). Bourdieu’s work has had signif-
icant impact within the discipline of sociology and been influential within
anthropology and applied subjects, such as education (Bourdieu and Passeron
1977; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). By contrast, Bourdieu’s work has been
relatively ignored by researchers publishing in the major North American and