Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management

Attention is paid to the detailed roles played by speciWc organizational actors with
their particular personal values, career interests, and organizational situations. But
these issues in the case study business are analytically located within and related
to a global political economy and a broader societal culture in which matters like
class, gender, and occupation are shown to play an important part. Similarly, the
theorizing pays attention to the interplay between material interests and structures
of domination, on the one hand, and matters of language and discursive practice
on the other. And, further, the theorizing is sensitive to the interplay between
constraining/enabling circumstances and contingencies, on the one hand, and
managerial and personal choices on the other.
The style of organizational theorizing advocated here is a critical and a social
scientiWc one. ThisWts with the general trend whereby organization theory has

Table 6.1 (continued )

Role of

proto-OT

in the

emergence of

personnel

practices

Role of OT in the

social scientific

study of personnel

management

Role of OT in

academic HRM

The potential role of OT

in the future analysis of

HRM: contributions from

four OT strands which

might be utilized within

a ‘pragmatic pluralist’

framework

employment

relationships and (b) the

continuous danger of

chosen means coming to

subvert the ends which

they were designed to

fulfill

Marxian

strand

Marxist industrial

relations (Hyman

1989)

Conflict manage-

ment seen as a vital

part of HRM; labor

process analysis;

ideology unmasking

in ‘critical HRM’

(Legge 1995)

HRM activities set in the

context of the

reproduction of

patterns of advantage

and disadvantage,

globally as well as

nationally

Post-

structuralist

and discursive

strand

Post-structuralist

‘critical HRM’

(Townley 1994)

HRM discourse

understood as shaping

working assumptions of

HR actors and providing

sense-making resources

for their use in

sense-making and

initiatives

122 t o n y w a t s o n