228 PROGRESSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
is not something that researchers can readily separate from everyday practical
managerial thinking. This is perhaps not surprising, given the irrationality of
the world and the mass of competing values, interests, and understandings
pointed to by Weber.
HR managers as the agents of industrial
capitalist corporations
The analysis so far has established how ambiguous, muddled, and contradic-
tory the role of ethical considerations is in HR work. There is no such simple
matter as either the individual HR manager or the HR function becoming
more ethical. Yet we have seen quite clearly that ethical considerations of
various kinds come into play in the making of HR-related decisions. And
individual managers are not without scope to throw into the mix of decision-
making criteria some personal ethical considerations of their own. But the two
cases we have seen so far would suggest that the potential here is limited. It is
to the degree to which this potential is generally limited that we now turn. And
to do this we need a theory of HR management which recognizes its role both
as an institution at the level of an industrial capitalist political economy and
as a function within work organizations. Let us consider the broader picture
first.
The main argument of my study of the personnel occupation (Watson
1977) was that it can be understood sociologically as an institution of indus-
trial capitalist societies which, alongside other institutions like trade unions
and the state, helps deal with the conflicts, tensions, contradictions, and unin-
tended consequences of a type of political economy at the centre of which
is the institution ofemployment and rational organization of free labour.This
is a way of organizing economic and social life which ‘works’. But it has to
be made to work: tensions, conflict, and contradictions which run through it
have to be ‘managed’. In later developments of this thinking (Watson 1986,
2006) it is argued that the central contradiction which HR helps to manage
is that between the principles ofcontrollingthe activities of organizational
employees (a principle which is inherent in the institutions of employment
and the rational or bureaucratic organization of work) and the principles of
freedom,choice, andautonomythat are implicit in the basic capitalist principle
of free labour and the political institutions of democracy. Given this role in
the world, we cannot expect HR managers to introduce ethical criteriain their
own termsinto decision-making. To manage all the conflicts and tensions with
which they are concerned they will nevertheless have to deal with ethical and
moral matters every day of their lives—but their task is one of dealing with