206 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
and cuts. The head of HR services and solutions worked closely with the
business unit leaders respectively for commercial services and engineering. He
was presumably convinced that integrated technology-based solutions made
available on-the-job were the most cost effective for training all of the man-
agement grades and customer sales. His leadership style was highly dominated
by business considerations so that people working for him in training services
and solutions were encouraged to see themselves as members of project teams
responsible for ‘deliverables’ measured according to the company’s business
need, strategy, budgets, and cost cutting.
The overall atmosphere seemed to be a complex mixture of job insecurity
and technological innovation. Employees within HR services and solutions
portrayed themselves as dealing with ‘technology resistance’ in the company.
Much of this resistance was understood to emanate from old people many of
whom had either left or were thought likely to be downsized in the future. The
future prospects for TBL were seen as positive overall because the younger
generation of employees had grown up with computers and were considered
able to use and learn from technology training solutions driven by business
need. Essentially, training was presented by HR managers as being a ‘business
within a business’, serving its ‘consumers’ and senior management whose view
counted most.
Despite the fact that HRM in the telecommunications company was much
more highly resourced for expenditure on employee development than was
the automobile company, its obsession with cost justification and cost control
meant that development opportunities were being missed and the collective
competence of the organization was at risk of being ignored (Pinnington
1990). The telecommunications company was more sophisticated in its busi-
ness leadership of training and development activities, however, there was
scant evidence that the obsession with converting cultural capital into issues
of economic capital was assisting with skill development in large sections of
the company, particularly its clerical support side and its technical and engi-
neering base. In short, we interpret that the downsizing of the company was
actually being supported by a ‘hollowing out’ of employee capabilities due to
HR slavishly seeking to operate as a business within a business. Consequently,
short-term top management goals of cutbacks were being reinforced but the
consumers (i.e. employees) were being starved of development opportunity
with perhaps the exception of immediate training needs related to short-term
job tasks.
Our overall evaluation of the situation is that employee development was
out-of-sync with even a purely instrumental company analysis of training and
development needs. The marketization of the training function and its atten-
dant conception of employees as consumers did not have either an intrinsic or
a thorough instrumental rationale for employee development. The employees
were not being treated as consumers for their own sake (Pinnington 1991).