72 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
more dominant position (companies like Microsoft come readily to mind).
Consistent with John Child’s re-formulation (1997) of the strategic choice
perspective, we believe it is important to steer a path between ‘hyperdeter-
minism’, on the one hand, and ‘hypervoluntarism’, on the other. That is, firms
are neither fully constrained by their environment nor fully able to create
it. Adopting a strategic choice perspective means that we portray firms as
experiencing a varying blend of constraint and choice positioned somewhere
in between these two extremes. The ‘choice’ in strategic choice is real but its
extent is variable.
Before moving on, we should note that this definition of strategy is based
at the business unit level. This level is, in fact, the most logical one at which to
define strategy because different business units are organized around markets
or segments of markets which require different goals and clusters of resources
(Ghemawat and Costa 1993). Strategic analysis and theory relates, nearly
always, to the business unit (Kaplan and Norton 1996; Porter 1985). However,
more complex frameworks are needed to encompass corporate strategy in
multidivisional firms (Boxall and Purcell 2003, ch. 10; Purcell and Ahlstrand
1994). Questions about ‘parenting’—about which businesses to buy and sell,
which to grow organically, and so on—are vital in multidivisional firms. While
recognizing this complexity, these choices are not essential to the argument in
this chapter, and we will put them aside.
Strategic goals and tensions in HRM
How HRM contributes to management’s efforts to deal with the problems
of viability and sustained advantage is the central question in the field of
Strategic HRM (SHRM). SHRM academics are interested in models and stud-
ies which link HRM to business performance or organizational effectiveness.
However, identifying strategic goals in labour management has long been a
troublesome project (Legge 1978). The framework we have developed (see
Figure 4.2) argues that HRM is concerned with three aspects of performance
that are critical to the firm’s viability and that may lay a basis for sustained
advantage—labour productivity, organizational flexibility, and social legiti-
macy (Boxall and Purcell 2003). This is not a simple matter because it is
inevitable that a firm’s attempts to attain its particular HR goals will be
accompanied by various kinds of ‘strategic tension’ (Boxall 1999; Cameron
1986; Evans and Genadry 1999), as we explain in what follows.
LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY OR COST-EFFECTIVENESS
Profitability is inevitably critical in shareholder-owned firms. However, it can
be affected by financial factors not connected to workforce management (such