HRM—LIMITS OF ETHICAL ACTION 233(Caldwell 2003). This can be explained sociologically, in structural terms.
Much of the time HR specialists workwithother managers to maintain control
over employee activities and to maximize the corporate benefits to be derived
from those activities. At other times, however, they find themselves working
againstline managers. Line or departmental managers are constantly faced
with short-term and localized pressures. And this means that HR managers
come to clash with them. This happens as a result of what we might call
the essentiallystrategicfunction of an HR department which requires HR
managers to consider the longer-term implications (as opposed to immediate
problem-solving pressures) and more corporate implications (as opposed to
local or sectional preferences) of human resourcing decisions and actions
(Watson 1986, 2006).
Although we can identify structural reasons for the continuing tensions
between line and HR managers, we need to give full recognition to the histori-
cal fight of personnel specialists to overcome their marginality—a marginality
very much associated with the welfare associations of the occupation’s history.
The very hint that an HR manager might be some kind of ‘do gooder’ is,
as much or more than ever it was, the kiss of death in terms of managerial
credibility. And to talk of being a ‘professional’ who wanted to bring ethics
to the boardroom table would be to risk an invitation to find the boardroom
door—unless that introduction of ethical concern was one pertinent to the
success or otherwise of the business. To talk of ‘good behaviour’ per se is to
invite in the men in white coats that Davern talks of. As Reed (chapter 10)
shows, the discourses and practices of ‘professionalism’ are not ones towards
which we can in general realistically look for an injection of ethicality into
the conduct of business and administration in the contemporary world. As I
have shown elsewhere (Watson 2002) the UK HR manager’s professional body
has more or less reinvented itself in the process of gaining state recognition
as a chartered body. Its Director General, in setting out the stall for what he
aims to be ‘a pathfinder for professional institutes in the twenty-first century’,
makes no reference to the ethical dimension of the older type of profession;
for him the CIPD is ‘a professional institute that adds value to its members in
theperformanceoftheirjobs...’(Crabb1999: 44). All its activities, it would
seem, are aimed at helping its members to be better servants of those who
employ them.
Conclusions
Altogether, it would appear that there is very limited, if any, scope for HR
managers as individuals or as members of an organizational HR department
or as members of an occupational association to intervene in organizational