STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT AND HUMAN RESOURCES 77(1987: 43), ‘employers require workers to bebothdependableanddisposable’.
Change involves tensions that pose major dilemmas for management strat-
egy and include trade-offs with the security interests of workers. To achieve
organizational flexibility, one of the most important strategic choices organi-
zations must make is to decide on the fundamental structure and processes
to build in order to achieve some degree of agility. Short-run responsive-
ness inevitably focuses attention on the decision-making ability of the top
management team since it is only they who can decide which resources to
cut or develop. As noted many years ago in groundbreaking research by
Burns and Stalker, business environments with ‘changing conditions, which
give rise constantly to fresh problems and unforeseen requirements’ (1961:
121) require firms to adopt an ‘organic’ structure of decentralization and
a more open management style. In such conditions, top management do
not have a monopoly on knowledge and have to rely on the wider pool of
skills and abilities of their employees to read environmental signals and adapt
to them. Here, ‘knowledge is assumed to be widely dispersed throughout
the organization, and broadened task roles and employee commitment to
the entire organization are emphasized. Communication patterns tend to be
lateral rather than vertical’ (Datta, Guthrie, and Wright 2005: 136). This is
a fundamentally different way of managing employees than that found in
sectors noted for their stability and bureaucratic order. Here, suggest Burns
and Stalker, a ‘mechanistic’ style is more appropriate. An HR management
style more based on principles of command and control is likely to be more
appropriate. While Burns and Stalker tend to see the choice between styles as
‘either-or’ (a not unreasonable assumption in the 1950s), we would argue that
in the much more turbulent environment of the first decade of the twenty-first
century many organizations have to find some measure of long-run agility and
manage for stable productivity simultaneously.
SOCIAL LEGITIMACY
It should by now be obvious that tensions and trade-offs are endemic to labour
management. Consciously or unconsciously, management is trying to build an
order within the firm which garners sufficient worker support—or sufficient
perceptions of legitimacy ‘from below’—to be viable (see, e.g. Burawoy 1979;
Lees 1997). The social order within the firm inevitably connects to the wider
society. Firms make use of human capacities that citizens and the state have
nurtured and generated (e.g. through public education). In this light, gov-
ernments often exercise their right to regulate employment practices. Workers
may also exercise sanctions against firms that offend social norms (either as
individuals who decide not to work for certain kinds of firms or to work