THE ETHICS OF HRM 45In particular, they are able to escape from the potential tyranny of ‘organizational
citizenship’, the kind of cultural requirement to work long hours, to help out colleagues
in difficulty and to promote the organization at all times.
In the case of knowledge workers, in particular, given their high employability,
the resultant ability to negotiate a contract on their own terms enacts their
positive freedom. As Guest (2001: 110) puts it:
They are taking control of their careers and their working lives by negotiating contracts
which offer a much better balance between work and the rest of their lives and which
free them from day-to-day aspects of exploitation by the organizational culture.
ROUTINE SERVICE SECTOR WORKERS
The sorts of workers I have in mind here are those working at unskilled
or semi-skilled, mainly customer or client-facing jobs, such as in retailing,
catering, call centres, and care homes. The amount of liberty such jobs afford
is heavily dependent on whether the ‘high’ or ‘low’ road to work design
and employment conditions is adopted (Batt 2000; Holman 2003; Korczynski
2002). Where the high road is adopted, in theory at least, quality of ser-
vice is prioritized and, with it, some degree of job discretion is afforded,
often expressed in terms of empowerment. In such cases, erstwhile ‘routine’
work begins to take on some of the characteristics of knowledge working
and the arguments developed above apply, particularly in relation to posi-
tive freedom. However, this only holds if ‘empowerment’ really does involve
an extension of employees’ autonomy, choices, and development, not, as
Sisson (1994: 15) has it, ‘making someone else take the risk and responsi-
bility’, or, as Kaler (1996) puts it, ‘what is happening is that management
is being relieved of some of its “responsibilities of command” by employ-
ees converting them into “responsibilities of subordination” ’. Interestingly,
in the service sector, much employee empowerment focuses on the ‘service
recovery’ of resolving customers’ complaints, an activity likely to be stressful
and involving emotional labour, rather than on the proactive taking of ini-
tiative in the original service offer (Korczynski 2002: 133). Certainly, the so-
called ‘empowerment paradox’ (Ganz and Bird 1996), whereby empowerment
is used to disempower people through their co-optation into a group that
represses dissent, would be highly damaging to both positive and negative
liberty.
Where the low road is adopted in the service sector, the outcome appears
to be Tayloristic task design, aimed at cost minimization, along with a stress
on surveillance and control (Korczynski 2002; Taylor and Bain 1999). The
stress associated with labour intensification may be exacerbated by the strains
of surface acting associated with emotional labour (Hochschild 1983; Rafaeli