50 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Guest and Conway 1998, 2000; Guest et al. 1997), Guest and colleagues argue
that such a contract is most likely to come into being in good workplaces,
where high-commitment HRM policies are implemented as part of a RBV
business strategy, or even in ‘lucky’ workplaces where they are implemented
because they are fashionable (Guest and Hoque 1994). In such workplaces,
the respondents who report the existence of more HR practices also report a
more positive psychological contract and greater job satisfaction, job security
and motivation and lower levels of work pressure (Guest 1999: 22). The more
HRM practices are implemented and the more there is scope for direct par-
ticipation, perhaps through schemes of employee involvement (EI), the more
likely it is that workers will experience positive liberty in the sense that they
feel they have more opportunities to participate in and exercise some influence
over relevant company decisions (Guest 2001). The unitarism of HRM would
not be problematic from the perspective of positive liberty as rational self-
determination on the part of all stakeholders would imply the compatibility
of the different ends they might seek. From the perspective of negative liberty,
though, with its assumption of plural, rivalrous, and conflicting ends, this
could be a problem.
The real problem with this suggestion, though, is not one of principle,
but one of pragmatics. The fact is that only a small minority of work-
places (14 per cent), at least in Britain, have high-commitment HRM in place
(defined as eight plus out of fifteen high-commitment management practices)
and these tend to beunionizedworkplaces (being present in 25 per cent of
workplaces that recognize a trade union and in only 5 per cent of those
that do not) (WERS 98). As EI is generally considered to be part of a high-
commitment HRM strategy, by definition, it is unlikely to be widely imple-
mented in workplaces failing to adopt such a strategy. Further, Marchington
(2001: 250) concludes that, even where EIisimplemented,
It is also clear that the impact of EI upon employees has not been great ...but perhaps
little more [than employees’ ‘mildly favourable’ response] could be expected given the
minor impact which EI has on most employees’ lives.
What role does this leave for trade unions? The finding from WERS 98, that
workplaces which were unionized tended to have a higher incidence of HRM
practices than those that were not, points to an important function that
they serve. As Brown et al. (2000: 627) aptly put it in a clear statement of
unions’ role in protecting positive and negative liberty, ‘collective procedures
are the custodians of individual rights’—a conclusion that is amply supported
by Terry’s research (1999) on the effectiveness—or lack of it—of collective
employee representation in non-union firms. The CIPD survey data suggest
that those employees who thought belonging to a union might increase fair-
ness at work were more likely to work in the services sector, traditionally of
low union density, and to report fewer HR practices at work (Guest 2001).