288 CONCLUSION
such circumstances, ethical conduct in the management of HR and treatment
of employees in all categories would be less a matter of senior managerial
discretion and more a formal matter of institutionalized and monitored rights
and obligations.
Within this framework, HR specialists could have a leadership role in the
business ethics of corporations that is relatively narrow in scope but of the
highest priority in meeting corporate CSR obligations. As there are many
different kinds of ethical issues in business and these relate more or less
closely to the various management roles not everything that applies to HRM
may be transferable. Even so, identifying how to ensure that corporations
seriously consider the ethical concerns of their HR managers points to ways
in which other management functions and specialists may be able to adopt
similar techniques. In this way, HRM is one of the most promising ways of
encouraging more ethical conduct in business in general. Without proposing
that HR managers should carry the major ethical burden of a corporation,
it offers them an opportunity to enact a specialized role for providing eth-
ical input to business practice through motivating and monitoring ethical
HRM.
Ethical HRM and the question of
its professionalization
Beyond this, we suggest that progression towards a more ethical HRM through
professionalization and reforms in corporate governance backed by changes
to management practices may offer some palliative to the recent trends
in employment relations, including increased uncertainty and insecurity of
employment, the decline of trade unionism, and the impact of economic glob-
alization (see Creighton Chapter 5). Ardagh’s comprehensive consideration
(see Chapter 9) of the criteria for recognition as a profession offers support to
the idea that HRM can be the basis for a profession that has sufficient moral
authority and organizational autonomy to justify being called a profession.
As the medical profession is committed to the social value of health and the
legal profession to that of justice, so the HRM profession could be seen as
promoting the basic social need of ‘well-being and dignity at work’, as well
as contributing to the productive efficiency of business. While doubts may be
raised with respect to any quasi-monopoly claims that might be made about
the exclusivity of such roles for HRM practitioners and the precise nature of
the expertise claimed in discharging their responsibilities, it is plausible that
there is the basis here for creation of a relatively autonomous profession that
would have the clout, in such areas as equal opportunity procedures, which