224 PROGRESSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
non-existent unless it is connected to a claim that the ethical act in question
(whether it be to treat employees in a ‘more ethical way’ or to avoid treating
them in a potentially ‘unethical way’) will, in one way or another, be ‘better
for the business’.
This argument is supported in two ways: theoretically and empirically. Soci-
ological theorizing will be deployed at two levels; the level of ethics in human
societies generally and the level of the institution of HR management in indus-
trial capitalist societies specifically. Empirical material will be drawn upon
throughout in outlining these theoretical ideas, this being taken from personal
research on HR practices and practitioners carried out over several decades,
some of it deriving from interview-based investigations but much of it coming
from ethnographic participant research in corporate HR departments. The
theoretical framing of this research evidence is especially important here.
Merely reporting relatively ‘raw’ empirical evidence to support a negative does
not in itself determine the argument that organizational research therefore
shows certain things are unlikely to happen. Nevertheless, there is one fairly
straightforward statement that is possible at this stage. I can say that after years
of personal research on HR practitioners and practices, I have never witnessed
a case of a significant employment management decision being influenced by
ethical arguments expressed by an HR practitionerin straightforward ethical
terms—without reference, that is, to the business/corporate advantages or
disadvantages of acting in particular ways. This does not mean, as we shortly
see, that HR managers are simply corporate lackeys, unable to exert any ethical
influence whatsoever.
Ethical irrationality, unintended consequences,
and HR decision-making
The first stage in considering the possibility of HR practitioners making
ethical interventions in the conduct of business in their organizations must
be to reflect on just what it is to ‘be ethical’. The complexities of this are
examined in various chapters of the present volume. For present purposes,
and to cut through much of the standard discussion of the varying types of
ethical scheme and the variety of criteria of ethicality available to managers
and others, it is helpful to look to the analysis of Max Weber and his concern to
understand the place of value-oriented actions in the ‘modern’ world. In some
ways his thinking anticipates more recent postmodernist or post-structuralist
ideas in his recognition that, as Willmott puts it (1998: 105), ‘no set of values
is intrinsically any better than any other’, and that ‘instead, there is an endless
clashing of many competing and irreconcilable value orientations’.