42 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
‘Ability’ raises two further issues. Negative freedom may be undermined by
acts of omission as well as commission, when situations that constrain choice
and which, it is believed, could be altered, are left unchanged. So, following
critical theory, leaving unquestioned and unchanged the deep structures of a
capitalist society that promote inequality and, hence, constrain the choices of
the resultant disadvantaged people, diminishes negative freedom. A union’s
role in challenging deep structures of inequality, conversely, promotes nega-
tive freedom. Similarly, because negative freedom is defined as choice among
alternatives that is unimpeded by others, it is further diminished if people have
been so conditioned to take for granted structures of inequality and exploita-
tion that choices that might be available to them are not perceived as avail-
able choices (Lukes 1974). Unions, as instruments of political consciousness-
raising, may again promote negative freedom.
However, it could be argued that institutional collectivism may also under-
mine negative freedom. Weber was clear that, in a pluralist society, the only
protection against the all-encompassing, constraining ‘iron cage’ of bureau-
cracy was the development of competing, counterbalancing institutions, such
as unions. But, as Michels pointed out, even institutions that were anti-
bureaucratic and democratic in intention, tend to become bureaucratic and
undemocratic. This is because, being avenues of social advancement for ener-
getic and talented members of the working class, the latter tend to abandon
any revolutionary aims for their class once their own social advancement is
achieved and the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ prevails, supported by collusion with
the bosses. As Beetham (1987: 63) puts it, ‘institutions created by the working
class to secure their emancipation [can], through processes of bureaucratiza-
tion, turn into agencies to perpetuate their own subordination’. Put differently,
this is the classic tension trade unions experience between the ‘administrative
rationality’ of bureaucracy and the ‘representative rationality’ of a voluntary
organization (Child, Loveridge, and Warner 1973). Furthermore, in pur-
suing positive freedom throughcollectiveself-determination, the individual
employee may find both his or herindividualpositive and negative freedoms
restricted in two ways. First, although collective self-determination may be
chosen by the individual as the rational path towards some valued outcomes
(e.g. a higher rate of pay for the job than that offered to equivalently skilled
non-union labour) (Freeman and Medoff1984), his or her positive freedom
at the same time may be restricted by union opposition to differential payment
via performance appraisal and performance-related pay within a job category.
Second, an individual’s negative freedom may be restricted by the ‘tyranny of
the majority’, in that the individual trade union member has to abide by deci-
sions of the majority of the membership, with which he or she may disagree, or
risk expulsion or opprobrium (e.g. in exercising the choice to cross picket lines
of a strike). It may be argued, of course, that in joining a union, an individual
makes a choice to accept such constraints to individual autonomy and, if the