232 PROGRESSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
to imply that he is no different from other HR managers, is conscious that
he is being interviewed about ethical matters. This may have coloured his
account. Also, his Christianity is an important part of his personal identity,
which may make him especially keen to accentuate his personal ethicality.)
The main point that is illustrated by this interview, for the present argument,
is the extent of the social structural or political-economic limitations upon
managerial ethical choices.
HR, professionalism, and the battle for
occupational legitimacy
In the interview segment with which this chapter opened, Bob Davern told
us that if he were to tell his senior managers that his professional body [now
the CIPD] ‘would be unhappy with the company going down a certain line
on employment matters on ethical grounds...well, they’d send for the men
in white coats’. This makes clear sense in the light of the emphasis given
earlier to the fact that managers are employees of corporations who are paid
to work to the bidding of their corporate employers. It is hard to imagine
non-HR managers being very concerned with the ethical views of the HR
colleagues’ ‘professional body’. Sociologically, the situation of the manager is
utterly different from that of the archetypal professional, who was an indepen-
dent fee-paid expert belonging to a professional body with an ethical code of
conduct with which the practitioner either had to comply or lose their licence
to practise (Millerson 1964). Over the past century, many occupations whose
members lack this traditional self-employed status have sought to increase
their social standing and their relative autonomy vis-à-vis employers by tak-
ing on certain characteristics of the old ‘learned’ professions (Abbott 1988;
Freidson 2001; Larson 1991). And Personnel or HR management has been
one of these occupations.
Professionalization has always been a double-edged sword for members of
the HR occupation. It has all the status-giving attraction that is traditionally
associated with membership of a qualifying association. But as Goldner and
Ritti (1967) argued as far back as the 1960s, ‘to be identified as part of a “pro-
fession” would preclude concurrent identification as general management’
(1967: 493) and this statement had to be read in the light of the recognition
that ‘The history of personnel specialists as a group is the history of a struggle
for status to become full members of the management team’ (Anthony and
Crichton 1969: 165). There is nothing to say that this situation has changed
over the subsequent near half-century. The tensions between line and HR
managers identified by Legge (1978) and Watson (1977) continue to exist