20 INTRODUCTION
we operate, and those who take a broader, more utilitarian view, focusing
on how to improve social and economic systems so as to achieve outcomes
that have overall social benefits. While HRM can be presented as an ethi-
cal movement that presents new ideas on how employee management can
better contribute to the advancement of particular companies and hence to
general economic prosperity, there are those who see HRM more as a repu-
diation of an ethical approach to employees than as a competing or sup-
plementary moral viewpoint, and wish to rehabilitate a more kindly generic
form of HRM in which the HRM specialist strives to promote employee
interests.
A similar tension appears in the different approaches that are taken towards
HRM reform. Many of the current theories of HRM point towards manage-
ment as a whole taking HRM more seriously and recommend ethical advance
by demonstrating to companies the importance, for instance, of employee
training and development, for the sustainable prosperity of the companies.
This is usually associated with calls for leadership on the part of senior man-
agement as a prerequisite of moral progress. A number of our contributors are
sceptical of the potential of such HRM reform and argue that more substantial
changes have to be made to societal institutions, legislation, government, and
corporate policies to support more ethical practice in HRM. Several of them
implicitly and explicitly recommend a further professionalization of HRM
practitioners to counterbalance the impersonal forces of market economies
and the decline of legal and trade union protection. The compatibility, feasi-
bility, and desirability of such developments are underlying subthemes of the
book to which further attention is given in the concluding chapter.