HRM—LIMITS OF ETHICAL ACTION 235the HR manager must look at the various gains and losses that employees
are going to experience when jobs and structures are changed—yet again
because of the risks of bringing about negative perceptions and consequent
poorer performances. Qualities of work experience, issues of consultation
versus unilateral action, possibilities of enhancing or harming trust rela-
tions are all business matters for the HR manager involved in organizational
changes.
Organizations are resource dependent on many constituencies and the
HR function has a particular responsibility for managing the organization’s
dependence on employee constituencies. Part of the managing of that depen-
dency is dealing with the question of how ethical or otherwise the treatment
of employees is perceived to be by various parties whose cooperation might
be withdrawn if negative conclusions are drawn (e.g. employees themselves,
the state, ethically concerned customers). But note the full logic of this: if an
employing organization were to find no objections raised to its treating of its
employees as semi-starved slaves, with the effect the workers continued to do
the required work, state agencies raised no objections, and customers were
untroubled by the experiences of the workers making their clothes or growing
their food, then any HR manager raising ethical objections to such a regime
would be a prime candidate for being escorted offthe premises.
Again we see pessimism alongside the optimism. And if we remember
that HR management occurs in organizations across the globe, with all the
inequalities prevailing in an allegedly globalizing world scene, we come to
recognize just what we are up against if the best that we can do is un-
subtly to invite those managers to ‘be more ethical, please’. But let us try to
end on a relatively optimistic note. Throughout a predominantly structural
analysis in this chapter we have encountered the possibilities of individual HR
managers finding ‘spaces’ within the business-dominated decision-making in
which they were engaged to bring to bear ethical considerations that were
personally important to them. In a close study of one especially ethically self-
aware manager (not, in this case, an HR specialist, however) I have shown
the possibilities of the manager doing more than ‘going with the flow’ of
the pressures coming from resource-dependent constituencies (Watson 2003).
This relatively ‘ethically assertive’ manager looked for opportunities to pursue
her personal environmentalist, humanist, and feminist ethical agenda through
her work. But in every case where she has achieved anything in this respect, she
insists that she did it by tying that ethically positive action to an action which
she was able to persuade her senior managers would either be of benefit to
the organization or would avoid dangers that the organization might get into.
To this extent, then, we can possibly argue that HR managers might be more
ethical and, where they can find an elective affinity between business interests
and ‘positive’ ethical moves, they might be able, at the margins, to make the
world a better place.