198 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
In short, Bourdieu offers a relational theory of individual action and soci-
etal structure that assumes all social relations have a tendency towards being
dominated, stratified, competitive, and bound by individuals’ dispositions;
inculcated and shaped primarily by family and, in modern societies, school-
ing experiences (Pinnington, Morris, and Pinnington 2003). Bourdieu argues
from a broadly relativist and instrumentalist perspective that individuals and
groups strategize in an overall field of power, which subdivides into dom-
inant and dominated groups. Within the dominant field of power, further
fields and subfields exist operating partly on the basis of their own princi-
ples. Each field possesses varying allegiances to economic and cultural capital
comprising an autonomous pole functioning according to cultural capital and
a heteronomous pole based on economic capital. A Bourdieusian concept
of strategizing can be counterpoised to rational actor models of strategic
decision-making, some of which tend to theorize economic activity as the con-
sequence of individuals making calculative, self-interested, profit-maximizing
decisions.
Bourdieu’s approach portrays individuals’ strategizing as relational rather
than the consequence of aggregated individual decisions. Strategy, he claims,
is shaped first by individuals’ dispositions, and second, by aspirations guided
by objective opportunities afforded in the structure of relations within and
between fields. Strategic positions are said to be taken by individual actors or
institutions seeking through practice to maximize the opportunities available
within the field. It recommends that understanding their practice should be
through understanding individuals or social groups as invariably being his-
torically situated in social fields. Application of Bourdieu’s theory of practice
therefore requires that researchers and practitioners in HRM sustain a critical
perspective on the changing distribution of economic and cultural capital
within social fields over time (Pinnington 2005).
So, summarizing this section along with the previous one, the twin capital
approach inspired by Bourdieu demands that researchers and practitioners
become more rigorous in their ethical understanding of HRM outcomes.
Kearns bemoans finding little evidence for the consistent practice of HRM
because, we feel, he chooses to ignore the multiple bases of organizational
action based on cultural capital rather than admit his frame of reference
emphasizing economic capital is too limited. From a very different theoretical
perspective on human capital, Lepak and Snell (2002) uncovered inconsisten-
cies in HRM and employment practices not least because employers’ policies
and practices are motivated by other things in life than simple economic
principles and (economically) consistent HR decisions.
The challenge for ethical practice in HRM then to our way of thinking is to
attain willing acknowledgement from elite economists on the one hand and
wealth-creating employers on the other hand of the multiple economic and
cultural bases for HRM. The stakes are high because ethics is in danger of