8 INTRODUCTION
sometimes paying no more than lip service to the tenet that ‘people are
our most important asset’. Evidence from research studies of recent imple-
mentations of HR practices designed to achieve a ‘high-commitment’ work-
force suggests that first most people prefer soft HRM to the other available
approaches and second, moral safeguards, nevertheless, need to be established.
These would include HR systems focused on employee well-being, such as
in establishing and maintaining channels for independent employee voice.
Ethical problems, he argues, also arise from institutions making inflated pro-
nouncements on the extent of causal linkage existing between implement-
ing HR practices and achieving improved performance. This is a particular
consideration for governments, consultancies, and professional bodies where
the temptation to exaggerate the efficacy of HR practices can be greater than
within the academic research context. Since the early 1990s there has been
growing talk of partnerships between employers and trade unions, but the
evidence is that they have not really taken root, in part due to mistrust remain-
ing on both sides. Guest concludes that partnership still has the potential to
address a number of ethical concerns in HRM practice, but cautions his reader
to be sanguine about the limited adoption and efficacy of HRM to date.
Chapter 4 by Peter Boxall and John Purcell (Strategic management and
human resources: the pursuit of productivity, flexibility, and legitimacy) is
concerned with the nature of strategic HRM (SHRM), its role and influence
on business performance and the ethical issues involved in this relationship. It
commences by defining strategy and reviewing common strategic problems
facing firms, inquiring how HRM contributes to a firm’s viability and the
achievement of competitive advantage. The central ethical question addressed
is the way that managers pursue their goals for labour productivity and orga-
nizational flexibility whilst also meeting the requirements for social legitimacy.
These goals are often in tension.
Boxall and Purcell’s chapter adopts a broad view of business performance
and presents an innovative conceptual framework for a socially responsible
and sustainable model of generic HRM. While many business analysts accept
the goal domains of labour productivity and organizational flexibility, the
authors argue that the pursuit of legitimacy is also vital because firms are
always ‘embedded in structures of social relations’ (Granovetter 1985). In
summary, legitimacy is a contested area wherein employers and employees
must observe the ethicality of their actions in the eyes of others.
Chapter 5 by Breen Creighton (Ethical employment practices and the law)
commences by noting that ideas about what constitutes ethical behaviour tend
to reflect the moral values of society at a particular point in time. This chapter
focuses specifically on the extent to which the law can be seen to mandate
and/or facilitate ethical employment practices in Australia in the early-twenty-
first century. On the one hand, current legislative provision retains a distinc-
tive ‘IR’ character. On the other hand, as in other countries such as the UK,