SOCIO-POLITICAL THEORY AND ETHICS IN HRM 27and which emphasized the Quaker ideals of service and the abhorrence of
conflict. The ideas of the socialists, or the growing cooperative movement
were not endorsed, and the Quaker egalitarian and democratic values were
downplayed. As Child notes, faced with their ethical challengers, the Quaker
employers were spurred to produce an articulate defence of management in
social terms. They argued that employers had the moral and social respon-
sibility to lead their organizations effectively. They had a duty to use the
most efficient managerial techniques in order to promote the greater good
of the community. Faced with considerable attack from within the Society
of Friends, they took the lead in the development of welfare measures for
employees, introducing paid holidays, sick pay, good working conditions, and
pensions. An example of their response to their ethical dilemma can be seen
at Bourneville, a village in the Midlands in the UK built to provide an ideal
living environment for the workforce at Cadbury’s. Cadbury’s employees were
provided with employer-built housing, schools, and churches and, of course,
there were no pubs. These employee benefits might have been seen as harming
the employer interest by raising labour costs, but the Quakers provided eco-
nomic as well as moral justifications for their strategy. They argued that these
policies had economic as well as moral advantages, serving to reduce labour
turnover and increase productivity.
The Quaker welfare provisions did not alter the basic authority relation-
ships at work, but they did provide arguments for the ethical, utilitarian value
of capitalist employment relationships. As Child notes, these arguments were
adopted by others and were to have an influence well beyond the Quaker
community. Quaker employers therefore led the way on welfare benefits,
and in promoting arguments about the value of industrial development for
employees and society as a whole. However, their abhorrence of social conflict
led them to reject employee demands for representation and the right to a
voice in negotiations on pay and conditions. They were not at the forefront
of employer acceptance of pluralism in the management of employment
relations.
From the mid-twentieth century, ethically based calls for the avoidance of
exploitation and the development of fair or just relationships at work have
often rested on pluralist assumptions about the nature of conflicts at work.
Pluralism characterizes the political theory that came to dominate thought in
Western economies at the end of the Second World War. Pluralism assumes
that there will inevitably be a complex web of different interests between
people in any complex social organization or society. These interests cannot
and should not be denigrated or ignored. They cannot be eliminated by
the revolutionary elimination of private property or the transfer of owner-
ship to the state. Instead, pluralist theory advocates democratic, participa-
tive decision-making process as the way to ensure that justice prevails, that
people’s differences can be debated and agreements reached acceptable to all.
At the political level, pluralist theory underlies democracy, and the right of