44 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
For such knowledge workers, the positive freedom of rational self-
determination, is achieved, at least in part, through choice of employer, the
enjoyment of a high discretion job, which may carry with it elements that
rational people might agree constitute the good life: work that is high on
Hackman and Oldham’s requisite task attributes, offering genuine empow-
erment, high material rewards, and a reasonable degree of job security. If this
implies respect for the employee’s skills and knowledge in their own right,
then the criterion of Kantian ethics is fulfilled; if recognition and career devel-
opment leads to self-actualization and the achievement of a coherent narrative
that renders life meaningful, then such work and employment conditions
score highly in Aristotelian terms. If such knowledge workers receive very high
material rewards, then this might be considered ethical under Rawls’ rule, if
one believes in a ‘trickle down effect’ (high pay is necessary to retain high
skills, which are necessary for organizational success, which is necessary for
economic growth, which contributes to everyone’s advantage). Even if it is
recognized that knowledge workers are not respected as ends in themselves,
but only instrumentally, as the means to organizational sustained competitive
advantage, this can still be considered ethical if, in terms of utilitarianism,
a case can be made (however difficult to demonstrate) that their work and
employment results in the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
However, can it be said that such employees enjoy negative freedom of
unimpeded choice? Strictly speaking, probably not. The choices presented to
knowledge workers in high discretion jobs, in terms of how they do their
jobs and in terms of work–life balance may be constrained by the demands
of other more powerful organizational stakeholders, promoting values that
may conflict with their own (short termism, shareholder value, long hours
culture). The pressure of an auditing society culture may give rise to processes
that may be highly constraining on their choices about what work they do
and the manner in which they do it (Power 1997). Nevertheless, in so far
as they freely chose to join the organization in the knowledge of the likely
terms and conditions of employment and with alternative choices available,
the spirit of negative liberty is fulfilled. This is especially true if the nature of
their knowledge and skill development, combined with the material benefits
they can command, extend the choices they can make in other life roles.
This argument is consistent with what, at first sight, might appear to be a
surprising finding by Guest and colleagues (2000): that working on a fixed
term contract correlated with perceptions of fairness on the part of their
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) survey respon-
dents. Guest and colleagues explained this finding in terms of both positive
and negative freedom (Guest et al. 2000 cited in Guest 2000: 109–10). The
workers’ negative freedom was protected in so far as a transactional con-
tract protects them from open-ended commitments ‘expected’ by an overly
demanding organizational culture.