HRM—LIMITS OF ETHICAL ACTION 229ethical problems and demands that arise with respect of employment matters
in the organization, not as ethical issues in their own right but in terms of their
relevance to the longer-term continuation of the organization.
The main logic of managerial work in modern corporations is one of main-
taining the long-term viability of the corporation which pays the managers—
with issues like profitability, market share, service to the public, and so on,
being means towards this rather than ends in themselves (Watson 2001, 2006;
note the continuity between this type of analysis and that of Boxall and Purcell,
as it was introduced by Pinnington, Macklin, and Campbell: pp. 1–20). The
main task of HR people, their rationale, the logic of their existence is to ‘keep
the organizational show on the road’. It is not to bring ethical considerations
that seem important or attractive to members of the HR occupation as private
citizens or members of a professional body into the interplay of values and the
conflicts of interest among the various constituencies with which the orga-
nization that employs them has a resource-dependent relationship. Managers
are agents of the organizations which employ them and are bound, given the
political-economic system within which they are working, to deal with labour
‘in terms of the return that can be obtained from it’, this meaning that an
HR manager who ‘deviated markedly from these criteria, putting employee
welfare before (longer-term) organizational advantage, would befailing to do
their job’ (Watson 1977: 196). And the same conclusion can be drawn from
reference to the classic identification of the key principles of bureaucratic orga-
nization (Weber 1978) which observes that the bureaucrat (and all managers
are bureaucrats, in these terms) cannot treat their post as their own property
or private territory. They are required to make all decisions and judgements
impersonally and neutrally, without personal preference or prejudice. Bureau-
cracy, as du Gay (2000) emphasizes, has its own ethic—one which separates
administrative work from the exercise of ‘private moral absolutisms’.
It is important to stress that the above analysis is very much a sociological
one. It identifies the basic logics or principles underlying the social institutions
of modern societies and the bureaucratic work organizations within which
HR managers operate. In practice, there will be considerable divergence from
the ideal typical patterns which sociologists (and economists and political
scientists for that matter) identify when characterizing different societal forms.
We have already noted that the ambiguities of life in organizations are such
that scope can be found for individual managers to bring personal ethical
concerns into decision-making situations, at least at the margins. Also, it
is becoming increasingly clear that strategic decisions in organizations are
not simply reactions to structural circumstances and contingencies but are
chosen by managers as part of a strategicchoiceprocess (Child 1972, 1997)
in which personal values and preferences play a part. And strategists’ own
identities and life priorities influence strategy making generally (Schoenberger
1994) and with reference to HRM specifically (Watson 2004). The question of