78 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
for them only with very limited commitment, or as unions which campaign
against certain kinds of employment practice). Increasingly, and especially in
the more agile firms noted above, the need to adopt more decentralized and
organic systems of people management and high-performance work practices
means that employers are more reliant on their employees for the achievement
of business goals. Employees themselves have more choices on how well they
undertake their jobs. ‘Discretionary behaviour’ is something that employees
can give and can withdraw (Appelbaum et al. 2000; Purcell et al. 2003).
This idea of employee choice has spawned a veritable host of studies
with roots back to the human relations school of the 1930s and onwards,
looking at the psychological contract (e.g. Coyle-Shapiro and Kessler 2000;
Robinson, Kraatz, and Rousseau 1994), organizational citizenship behaviour
(e.g. Organ and Moorman 1993; Podsakoff, Ahearne, and MacKenzie 1997),
and organizational justice (Folger and Cropanzano 1998). A common thread
is that employees’ responses to management decisions and actions will be
mediated and judged through a lens of legitimacy. Has the employer broken
implicit promises that make up one side of the psychological contract? Has
the management met the tenets of justice in the way decisions are made that
affect employees, in the equity of the distribution of resources, rewards, and
punishments, and in the way employees are told about them and how much
say they have? Why should an employee decide to ‘go the extra mile’ if basic
rules of legitimacy are not met?
If firms wish to grow and make greater use of a society’s resources, they
must generally comply with prevailing social norms (Lees 1997). Individual
firms rarely have opportunities to influence social standards although they
may try to locate in societies with lower labour costs, providing this will help
them achieve viability in their business sector (and it may not if labour of the
right type and quality is simply not available). Individual firms generally need
to take the established ethical framework in relation to labour management
as a given and these can vary between nations and societies. Multinational
firms find they cannot behave the same way in each location. Over time,
however, the picture is not so simple: business typically has a major voice in
the wider political-economy of societies and can, if other forces co-align, foster
significant changes in notions of legitimacy.
For example, management played a major role in reshaping institutions
for employee voice in Anglo-American societies as unions and collective
bargaining lost workforce support in the 1980s and 1990s. Voice practices
have not disappeared in the Anglo-American world but have become more
diverse and more direct (Boxall and Purcell 2003, ch. 8). The ‘transformation’
of IR (Kochan, Katz, and McKersie 1986) was strongly influenced by shifts
in the underlying beliefs and values of executives in large firms and in the
withdrawal of state support legitimizing the union role. The latter was most
obvious in Britain with Mrs Thatcher’s attack on collectivism in all its guises