INTRODUCTION 13the politics of expertise in advanced capitalist societies is becoming increas-
ingly complex, contested, and uncertain as to its longer-term implications
for professional jurisdiction, power, and values. This means that professional
contexts can only offer increasingly undecided contexts for formulating ethical
frameworks, discussing, and making moral decisions.
Chapter 11 by Ashly Pinnington and Serkan Bayraktaroglu (Ethical lead-
ership in employee development) challenges people working within HRM
to pursue employee development more vigorously than has occurred in the
previous century. The chapter identifies ways that HRM can become more
capable of ensuring joint fulfilment of organizational goals and employees’
interests. Its central contention is that HRM has in the past had a tendency
to overplay the significance of the organization’s part of the bargain and has
failed to exercise leadership through somewhat blatantly ignoring employees’
development.
The problem of one-sided managerial prescription is examined and it is
proposed that it fails to serve employees both ethically and economically.
Then research conducted on HRM and performance during the 1990s is
considered and its preference for operationalizing narrow and somewhat naive
conceptualizations of strategy is critiqued. The predominance of simplistic
quantitative criteria for measuring performance outcomes in research studies
is noted and the suggestion made that HRM should be considered applying
both economic and cultural frames of reference. The term ‘cultural capital’
is introduced defined broadly as subsuming a variety of types of capital
that are irreducible purely to economic relations. As a way of thinking
more insightfully about leadership and employee development, the concepts
of economic and cultural capital developed by the late sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu are proposed. The cultural aspect of Bourdieu’s theory of practice
is applied to two case studies on HRM leadership in employee development.
The cases illustrating employee-centred and business-dominated leadership
styles are discussed and finally recommendations are made for establishing
more ethical practice in HRM.
Chapter 12 by Tom Sorell (Ethics and work in emergencies: the UK fire ser-
vice strike 2002–3) addresses contemporary Western economies’ IR and col-
lective bargaining processes in the specific context of emergency services work
analysing the case of industrial action carried out in 2002–3 by the UK fire ser-
vices. Collective action by trade unions operating in emergency services, Sorell
notes, has traditionally been regarded as morally sensitive and it has taken new
significance throughout Western countries since September 11 2001.
The morality of the strike first declared by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU)
in November 2002 is discussed, and so is the justification of various govern-
mental and management attempts to reorganize work so that emergency and
disaster services workers deal more proactively with terrorist problems than
has been expected of them hitherto. The new terrorism duties allocated to the