SOCIO-POLITICAL THEORY AND ETHICS IN HRM 33the expected American-style liberalism. A strong element of neo-corporatism
remained in West Germany, while Japan continued its dual labour market
practices with privileged and lifetime employment for the male, regular work-
ers in large corporations in the primary labour market, supported by strong
social norms on gender inequality and close government–industry collabora-
tion regulating economic affairs. Changes were made, but it did not prove easy
to change the fundamental nature of established economic and social systems,
based as they were on traditional beliefs about the nature of authority and the
appropriate social roles for government, employers, and employees. Whitley
went on to compare the current systems in East Asia and Eastern Europe,
contrasting South Korea with Taiwan, and Hungary with Slovenia. Again his
study demonstrates the complexity and continuing diversity of management
and employment systems. Humans are capable of creating and maintaining an
extraordinary range of social and economic organizational forms to structure
work and employment. There is no simple logic in the solutions that people
find to the many dilemmas associated with organizing work, and certainly
no evidence of a simple convergence to traditional, developed-economy, or
Western, norms.
Some fascinating issues for the analysis of HRM in the twenty-first cen-
tury are likely to arise from the development of the Chinese economy. After
the 1950s, the rise of the Japanese economy stimulated important academic
debates about differences in the organization of work and practices in HRM.
The early arguments confidently predicted that Japan’s traditional HRM poli-
cies could not survive economic development and would inevitably transform
to the familiar, more liberal, occupational rather than organizational, labour
markets of Western Europe and the USA. Such arguments were then replaced
by suggestions that Japan’s HRM might represent a ‘late-development’ effect
and that Japanese policymakers did not need to follow the path of the early
industrializers, indeed there would be a ‘reverse-convergence’ as large Euro-
pean and US firms adopted Japanese HRM practices and used dual labour
markets to drive the success of their large-scale work organizations. Finally,
comparative analysis has led to work like that of Whitley, which recognizes
the continuing diversity in work practices that is fuelled by the interaction
between ideological traditions and long-established social and political struc-
tures, and the pressure of economic development. In Japan, the influence
of the USA after the Second World War helped explain the strength of the
early assumptions about the relevance of liberal labour markets, and pluralist
employee representation and participation in the newly developing economy.
In China and the newly industrializing countries in its region, Western influ-
ences do not have this type of support. In a society where dominant ideas
derive from Confucius, Mencius, and Mao, the developments in HRM are not
likely to be liberally based. Government control and political concerns about
tensions between the peasantry and city will continue to play major roles.