14 INTRODUCTION
UK fire service in contrast significantly strengthen its claims for exceptional
treatment in pay negotiations. Not only are these duties often burdensome
when discharged, they are likely to involve dangerous tasks. Tom Sorell con-
cludes that the UK fire service strike demonstrates the need to disaggregate the
general category of emergency service work and occupations and the impor-
tance of analysing more carefully the fairness of allocation of tasks and respon-
sibilities within occupations such as the fire brigade or the police. Perhaps
most significant, it asserts that politicians, public service officials, employers,
and employees have opportunities to make their policies and actions morally
defensible, namely by attending rigorously to the distributive and procedural
justice of the reorganization of work.
The four chapters in Part III (Progressing HRM) concentrate on proposed
courses of action taken by organizations and by individuals to attain a more
ethically sound HRM. The first two chapters concentrate on moral dilem-
mas, formulating moral intentions and problems arising from having to deal
with the intended and unintended consequences of our actions. The last
two chapters address institutional and individual ethics encouraging mutual
respect and moral decency.
Chapter 13 by Tony Watson (HRM, ethical irrationality, and the limits of
ethical action) begins with the words of an HR director who is reflecting on his
naivety when, as a young personnel officer, he accepted a view of the personnel
function as the moral conscience of the organization. He is now much more
realistic and takes a view consistent with Watson’s contention that opportu-
nities for individual initiative and ‘ethical’ intervention are rare and tightly
circumscribed by management’s business goals. Several lines of argument are
advanced to help explain the dilemma of ethics in human societies in general
and, more specifically, in the institution of HRM within industrial capitalist
societies.
Drawing from work by Max Weber, Watson proposes that ethical irra-
tionality is pervasive. This means that no set of values can ever be entirely
consistent. Additionally, no set of particular actions will inevitably lead to
the intended ethical outcomes. He observes that in practice in HRM personal
ethical criteria are invariably enmeshed with business-oriented criteria. Then,
further complicating matters for ethicists and moralists is the existence of the
paradox of consequences. In essence, institutions and procedures established
to achieve certain social goals paradoxically, once in operation, tend to become
disconnected from those goals. Chosen means come to undermine the desired
ends for which they were chosen. To illustrate this dilemma, Watson describes,
from his research, the experience of a personnel officerwho,byherown
account, found her presence and interventions to be working against her own
intent and her assigned personnel objectives.