192 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
HRM—bias towards organizational outcomes and
lack of emphasis on employee outcomes?
The field of HRM has accountabilities for both organizational and employee
outcomes. Many of the organizational considerations have been specified and
elaborated since the beginnings of the debate on ‘HRM versus personnel
management’. The hard HRM thesis (Fombrun, Tichy, and Devanna 1984)
was famed for its foregrounding of the bottom line benefit and competitive
success of the organization and the soft HRM thesis (Beer et al. 1984) has been
renowned for its emphasis on employee outcomes (most notably ‘employee
influence’). These original positions have since been elaborated in other acad-
emic frameworks and models. In general, theories have sought to understand
possible lines of causation or influence between the organization’s strategic
position, vision, and mission, through to HRM. They endeavour to describe
or predict the creation of HRM policies, and then move on to the imple-
mentation of HRM practices, and finally, the achievement of overall busi-
ness and HRM outcomes (Boxall and Purcell 2003; Pinnington and Lafferty
2003).
George Strauss (2001) has argued persuasively that there are long-standing
historical differences of belief between the USA and the UK/Australia/New
Zealand on the nature and character of HRM. Strauss claims that the USA
has never really evolved from the personnel management perspective whereby
concern is with maximizing employee contribution and minimizing social
obstacles (including satisfactory compliance with employment legislation) to
the achievement of business objectives. The UK/Australia/New Zealand view,
he proposes, is very different due to its stronger commitment to pluralist val-
ues of collective rights to trade union organization and employee influence in
management. In support of his argument, he notes the consistency of subject
matter and overall orientation in US business courses and textbooks through-
out the last four decades of the previous century. He contrasts this continuity
in the USA with the sudden disruption and heated debate occurring between
IR specialists and the new HR specialists in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK,
Australia, and New Zealand.
A body of interesting research work has evolved out of this fierce debate
on collective IR versus individualized employee relations. It concentrates on
the new partnership roles for trade unions and on ways of encouraging more
‘employee voice’ in both unionized and non-unionized organizations. One of
the surprising findings of the empirical research in this field has been that
HRM has been found to bemore frequentlypresent in unionized than in non-
unionized organizations (Pinnington and Edwards 2000). This is somewhat
counter-intuitive, especially for people maintaining a vigorously manager-
ial viewpoint, because it demonstrates paradoxically that HRM policy and