THE ETHICS OF HRM 47freedoms to make unconstrained choices. For example, Korczynski (2002)
identifies ‘extreme’ forms of sales work, characterized by the active stimulation
of demand, rather than responding to customers requests—such as in selling
financial products—as particularly vulnerable to ethically questionable prac-
tices. Korczynski argues that the practice of paying such salespersons largely
by commission, induces an instrumental orientation, whereby customers are
perceived purely as a means to an end: profit for the organization and high
reward to the salesperson. This results in salespersons, in defiance of Kantian,
Rawlsian and stakeholder ethics, developing an ideology which legitimizes
techniques of customer manipulation, either by viewing the customer pater-
nalistically, as someone who needs help to see the true benefits of the product,
or by internalizing an image of the customer as dishonest that enables them
to justify and rationalize their own manipulation of the customer. To survive,
it is suggested, salespersons need to develop a ‘will to ignorance’ about the
tensions between a paternalistic image of customers and their instrumental
manipulation (Oakes 1990: 87). However, as Korczynski argues, this will to
ignorance, combined with a managerial vacuum, consequent on the culture
of selling promoting values of entrepreneurial self reliance among the (largely
male) workforce, led directly to the massive and systematic mis-selling of
financial products in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The instrumentality of capitalism in the pursuit of profit is also at the
heart of the colonization and commodification of the emotional labour of
service workers (Sturdy and Fineman 2001). As ‘quality of service’ becomes
increasingly the differentiator in achieving competitive advantage, so front-
line service workers are required to both manage their own emotions and
provide behavioural displays associated with feelings in their interactions
with customers (Hochschild 1983; Korczynski 2002). Hochschild argues that
this leads to alienation on the part of the service worker as a result of the
commodification of emotion, structured inequality in relation to customers
and managerial imposition of feeling rules, thereby restricting the employee’s
positive and negative liberty. Employees are required not only to act inauthen-
tically through ‘surface acting’, in contravention of Aristotelian ethics, but to
internalize the feelings they are meant to display (‘deep acting’). If this involves
internalizing an ethic of care towards abusive customers, in order to create
profit for the organization, the employee is being abused by management as
much as by the customer. If the employee genuinely feels caring towards the
abusive customer, perhaps he or she (usually she) (Tyler and Taylor 2001)
might be simultaneously applauded for altruism (caring for someone with
a ‘problem’, as flight attendants are encouraged to redefine a troublesome
passenger) or pitied for their false consciousness and eroded autonomy.
However Korczynski (2002) argues that Hochschild’s identification of the
conditions for objectivealienation ignores the possibility that emotional
labour may be a source of fulfilment, as the natural and spontaneous