32 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
support)? These issues are still contested, often on the basis of assumptions
and beliefs that have their origins in the earlier debates on pluralism in social
organization.
The responsibility, authority, and appropriate role of government remains
as relevant to debates about employment now, as it was in the nineteenth
century. There have been radical changes in the arguments about public
ownership and control, however, there is broad recognition of the need for
some governmental regulation to constrain the unethical use of economic
power by managers or employers. Despite this broad agreement, there is room
for much debate on the form this should take, for example, on the role of
government regulation over health and safety, remuneration, training and
development, equal opportunity or EO, and job security.
The shrinking world and the extraordinary growth of multinational cor-
porations have introduced new complications. Whereas the need for publicly
focused regulation in these areas was once discussed in terms of an analysis
of different ideas about the ‘role of the state’, globalization challenges the
solutions which relied on the power of the nation state to establish regulations.
International Labour Organization (ILO) and international ‘governmental’
regulation is not well developed, but this form of government intervention
must be seen as of increasing importance to HRM, as the sovereign power
of the nation state is eroded by the increasing cross-national mobility of
capital and labour. The importance of cross-national debates about economic
regulation, including the regulation of employment relations, should provide
an increasing angle of interest for teaching and research in HRM.
Globalization has also brought a recognition of the diversity of the socio-
political traditions that have importance for modern HRM. The Western
traditions discussed in this chapter are not the only ones that will influence
employment policies in the twenty-first century. The very different socio-
political theories of the newly developing nations can confront or challenge
ideas once taken for granted in studies of the management of humans in a
modern economy.
This is clearly illustrated by the work of Whitley (1999). His study ofDiver-
gent Capitalismsprovides a picture of the different types of social, political,
and managerial arrangements that are constructing very different capitalist
systems. He illustrates the power of different traditions in social and political
thought in his analysis of the attempts by the USA and its allied powers to
restructure the economies and politics of West Germany and Japan after the
Second World War. They adopted a strategic policy to introduce liberalism,
in the form of liberal economic, IR, and management practices, in order to
create the social structures and processes believed to be necessary to support
democracy and prevent the re-emergence of totalitarian military regimes.
However the allied strategies of social reform did not have the results expected.
The different systems altered, but there was no general convergence towards