CONCLUSION 283Chapter 4). Guest (see Chapter 3) acknowledges such inherent conflicts and
so far the limited adoption of proactive HRM policies such as in partnership
arrangements between stakeholders, but like Boxall and Purcell, he remains
positive overall about the potential of HRM within business and society. In
contrast, Legge (see Chapter 2) is altogether more critical arguing that the
reduction in collectivist arrangements is creating a divide between people such
as elite groups of knowledge workers who can anticipate reasonable conditions
of employment and fairer and more ethical treatment at work than is the deal
for the bulk of employees. In contrast to the variety of political institutions and
normative value systems within society, HRM therefore sometimes appears
like flotsam on the surface of the seas (see Palmer, Chapter 1).
The second implication therefore, of the contributions taken together, is
that such solutions as there are to thecritical ethical issues in HRM have to
be addressed at both the macro- and the micro-level, including issues of social
and political philosophy, government regulation, board room policy, and CEO
initiative, as well as line management and HR management. More specifically,
HRM practitioners are in a weak position whenever they seek to implement
ethical HRM without a framework of sensible legal regulation, the support
of senior management and an agreed area of authority for decision-making
(see Creighton Chapter 5). If HRM systems become too closely related to
serving politically dominant ideologies and sectional interests, then the best
ethical role available to even courageous HRM specialists may be to promote
good and mitigate bad moral decisions taken elsewhere (see Pinnington and
Bayraktaroglu Chapter 11).
Most contributors stress the substantial complexity of the ethical choices
that arise with respect to HRM, the difficulty of determining the morally best
HRM strategies, and what to do when faced by unethical and even illegal HRM
practices. Moral judgement on such matters has to relate to the nature of the
political, economic, and legal system in place, the cultural realities of the orga-
nization and sector in question, and the personal capacities and circumstances
of the individual practitioner. Ethical HRM is a complex and multifaceted
matter in which there are no easy solutions and few evidently correct answers.
More attention should be paid to the distributive and procedural justice of
work and employment relations and particularly to HRM’s role in productiv-
ity improvement, work reorganization, organizational flexibility and change
(see Sorell Chapter 12). This book demonstrates insights can be gleaned from
a wide range of disciplines and debates in, for example, legal ethics, neo-
Weberian sociology, stakeholder theory, utilitarian economic philosophies,
Kantian ethics of respecting persons, Aristotelian concepts of virtue and
capabilities, human rights and reflections as to how decent people behave in
morally difficult situations, but there is no ready-made ethical theory from
which uncontroversial HRM policies can be readily derived (see Macklin
Chapter 16). Hence, we have not sought in this book to reduce the subject
matter of HRM, ethics and employment purely to theoretical abstraction.