48 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
enactment of an altruistic ethic of care, of respect for others, an expression of
positive liberty. When employees have some autonomy in their expression of
emotional labour, and have socially embedded relationships with customers,
as in many of the traditional ‘caring’ jobs associated with the ‘naturally’ caring
female labour (or rather socially constructed through patriarchy) (Tyler and
Taylor 2001), real satisfactions for both parties may result. Indeed, Korczynski
points out that tensions may arise in what he terms the ‘customer-oriented
bureaucracy’ when employees are constrained by its instrumental rationality
from delivering the degree of individual care and attention that they consider
to be appropriate—an erosion of their negative liberty.
Nevertheless, a casecanbe made for the ethicality of routine semi-skilled or
unskilled work in the private service sector, albeit a weak one. That is, that the
worker as a rational, autonomous person (positive liberty) freely chooses to
engage in that activity and freely enters a contract with the employer that spec-
ifies an ‘acceptable’ effort-reward bargain. While the work may lack Hackman
and Oldham’s requisite task attributes and be characterized by fragmentation
and repetition, or by manipulative, inauthentic behaviour, whether on the part
of the employee or agents of capital, it may be justified in utilitarian terms
by the production of products and services of high use value and low cost
to consumer, by the generation of wages to the employee-producer and of
dividends to shareholders. Although the work may lack the characteristics to
provide for self-actualization, it may deliver some satisfactions to the worker
through the rhythms of the activity itself (Baldamus 1961), through social
interaction (Roy 1958), and through the collusive game playing that ‘manu-
factures consent’ (Burawoy 1979). Further, in Aristotelian terms, by providing
the opportunity for the worker to endure such work in exchange for a wage
that may support dependents, it enables the expression of altruism, even at
the cost to her negative liberty. It could also be argued that it is patronizing to
portray such workers as downtrodden automata, as much evidence exists of
their resistance to surveillance and control in order to protect their autonomy
and negative liberty (e.g. Bain and Taylor 2000; Knights and McCabe 1998).
There again, is it ethical to restrict autonomy beyond the extent that Kantian
and Rawlsian rules apply?
A major critique of such a justification is the questionable nature of the
assumption that the employee ‘freely’ enters such an effort-reward bargain,
as an enactment of positive liberty. For many people, choice of what work
they do and what employment contract they can command is limited by the
structural inequalities of their society, by the fact that it doesnotadhere to
Rawlsian principles of a just society and thereby erodes many employees’
negative liberty. Further, the mantra of ‘global competitiveness’ encourages
First World governments to cut back on employee rights and welfare, as
these may be perceived as costs eroding a country’s ability to compete in
tradables and as encouraging portfolio and foreign direct investment to shift