This is the html version of the file http://www.management.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/hrmphenomena/Peltonen.pdf.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
Page 1
The Powers Of The Human Resource Manager:
Authority And Accountability In The
Finnish Personnel Professionals’
Discourse On ‘HRM’
Stream 8: Human Resource Management Phenomena – HRM and beyond
Tuomo Peltonen
University of Oulu
PB 4600, 90014 University of Oulu, Finland
Tuomo.Peltonen@oulu.fi
Page 2
2
INTRODUCTION
The concept of Human Resource Management has provided the prism through which
the theory and practice of personnel administration has been viewed and evaluated
over the past two decades (Fombrun, Tichy & Devanna 1984, Beer et al 1984). After
the initial excitement over the possibility to be recognized as equals among the other
corporate specialisms such as marketing or accounting, the personnel profession has
been taken back by the reservations expressed in the management discourses about
the primacy of their expertise in the steering of the organizations. Apart from the
influential theoretical remarks on the HRM model (Legge 1995, Townley 1994), the
observations from the field have indicated that not even the HR practitioners have
been able to obtain centrality within the managerial networks. As Purcell (1995) and
Armstrong (1995) have noted, among others, HR issues continue to be viewed
secondary to the immediate financial and market considerations, despite of the
popularity of the recent ‘resource based’ and ‘competence’ models of business
strategy (Boxall & Purcell 2003). There is a limited albeit growing body of empirical
evidence that supports the view that despite of the acclaimed primacy of the human
resource agenda in the firms, the HR knowledge and skills are not perceived as part of
strategic leadership (Marginson et al 1993, Millward et al 2000).
The failure of the HR profession to polish its profile can be explained from a number
of perspectives. The managerialist scholars might argue that the HRM/SHRM-
paradigm will create the long needed appreciation for the HR expert once the model
has been fully implanted into the running of the organizations (e.g.Ulrich 1997 ). The
organizationally oriented HRM researchers, in turn, could note that the application of
the human resources approach to people management is contingent on a number of
social, cultural and power factors that may support or hinder the introduction of HRM
in the organizations and that these mechanisms could explain why HR is not popular
(e.g. Gratton et al 1999). Some might also point to the cultural symbols and
institutionalised meanings attached to HRM as reasons why it has not become
accepted as ‘strategic’ activity (e.g. Galang & Ferris 1997).
Yet all these perspectives approach the inferiority of HRM and HR professionals as
dependent on forces outside of the prevailing organizational forms. This modernist
position is challenged for example by Latour (1997), who notes that the emerging
relations and nets of sociality are their own explanation, in that ‘each network by
growing ‘binds’ so to speak the explanatory resources around it and there is no way
they can be detached from its growth.’ This alternative is premised on the idea that
social phenomena like power are secondary effects of the organizing practices and the
stabilization of relations between entities and individuals (Foucault 1982, Latour
1986), and their architecture can be traced or mapped by following the construction,
stabilization and maintenance of the normalized forms of sociality (Lee & Hassard
1999).
While the contemporary organizational forms have been interrogated from the
perspective of the role of the HR techniques (Townley 1994) and the HRM concepts
(Jacques 1999), attempts to look at the positioning of the HR experts in the unfolding
of the organizational ordering are missing. One can read, though, from the (critical)
descriptions of the role of the HR professionals the reproduction of the established
Page 3
3
dualisms such as the strategy formation and strategy implementation, which are not so
much neutral frames to record the position of HR but asymmetrical discourses which
already implicate the existence of the Other in the oppositional place of the dualism.
The descriptions that, ostensibly, merely ‘note’ the inferiority of the HR expertise in
the organizations also provide, in themselves, a performative (Latour 1986)
explanation for this: HR with its ‘observed’ fragmentation and incidental, ad hoc
‘nature’ (Townley 1994, 3) is automatically de-valued because it does not match with
the qualities assumed as ‘strategic’ or ‘management-related’ in the current post-
bureaucratic ideas of organization.
The everyday vulnerability of the personnel manager to the implicated hierarchies of
the organizational discourse cannot, however, be deducted from beforehand from the
prevailing institutional power/knowledge structures and the positions reserved for the
HR expertise there. As Munro (1997) has noted, dualisms and divisions are not
merely things ‘out there’, recordable from the textual properties of organizational
practices and management writing, but more like social accomplishments that have to
be continuously made and re-made. This, for Munro, means a mode of ‘discourse
analysis’, where ‘rather than place what is considered to be key divisions outside
analysis, keeping them distinct as part of one’s own analytical armoury, all
distinctions, great and small, should be given to those who perpetuate them’ (Munro
1997, 17), implying a focus on the actors under study as practical researchers who are
engaged in the ongoing ‘membership work’ to find out there the boundaries of the self
and the others are to be located. Such a perspective on the HR managers’ own making
of their power position (cf. Latour 1997) begs for a close analysis of their own
situated performance of organizational elements and relations, and the evolving
positioning of their own professional personae in this ordering.
EMPIRICAL MATERIAL AND ITS ANALYSIS
In this paper, I will look at a group of Finnish HR managers, focusing on their
manoeuvres and tactics in the local ordering of the research interview situation. The
material used in the study consists of theme interviews given by five different human
resource managers from various industries. In accordance with the qualitative
‘specimen’ perspective (Alasuutari 1995), the research interest was not really on
whether the managers tell the truth or not or what their answers tell about them as
individuals. Instead, the focus was on their talk as a process of ordering and
influencing. The HR managers and the researchers – me and the graduate student -
jointly produced and negotiated the world of organizations and the location of the
HRM in that world, and the material is here read as an ongoing struggle for situational
control and authority without any a priori assumptions regarding who is ‘in power’
and who is ‘marginalized’.
Furthermore, conversation is seen as an ongoing struggle for situational and
sequential authority where the contested terrain is the burden to account. Struggle
over accountability is visible as the moves and turns, which push the other into a state
where he/she feels, obliged to account for his/her actions (Heritage 1996, Peräkylä
1998). The one who ends up as being the accountable party of an emerging relation
Page 4
4
has ‘lesser power’ since he/she becomes dependent on the authority figures’
validation of the ‘status report’. However, the recognition can be deferred, and the call
for accountability can develop into a more enduring sense of otherness and inferiority
although at the same time it should be kept in mind that the individual can resist and
reframe the local situation and thus escape from the emerging power relation (Munro
1999). Using this insight from ethnomethodology as a simple methodological
guideline, the interview transcripts were organized into themes and occurrences where
the authority of the HR manager is being gained as a result of the shift in the
accountability relation and into conversational issues where such power position does
not emerge.
THE PERSONNEL MANAGERS’ MANOEUVRING IN THE INTERVIEW
The analysis of the material is presented in accordance with the successful situational
manoeuvring. First, the focus is placed on those arguments in which the manoeuvring
of the personnel manager succeeds. Then the analysis proceeds to investigate themes
in which the image coloured by accountability dynamics is not as favourable for the
personnel specialist.
When manoeuvring succeeds
Personnel management is both hard and soft
One of the central inner tensions in personnel management is the dualism between the
hard and the soft HRM (Legge 1995). Soft HRM refers to a humanistic approach,
where the objective of the personnel administration is to advance the well-being and
creativity of individuals. Then again, hard HRM refers to the value of personnel being
a profitable factor in a firm, something that has a price and a productive value of its
own. In the interviews, the managers were directly asked how they felt about this
tension and more importantly, whether they saw any concrete problems ensuing from
the juxtaposition between hard and soft affecting the work of personnel management.
Without exception, all the interviewees responded to the question fluently and
generally appealed to the fact that both approaches are necessary on the individual
level and that together they support successful entrepreneurship. This kind of ability
to handle the theme suggests that the interviewees are familiar with handling a tension
of this kind from before and have tried to solve it for their benefit elsewhere as well.
The ability to argue against such a formulation became obvious in their
straightforward manner to respond to the question. For instance, a manager of an
expert company reacted to the question like this:
‘Shall we say that first of all there is a hard side to the arrangement and
there is a soft side to it… that’s how I see it, as a sort of a red rag..’
After having expressed this opinion, the manager takes upon to deal with the hard-soft
dualism and turns it upside down with a smart rhetorical gesture, a question aimed at
oneself:
‘If the soft side is understood as something in which the manager takes
care of the personnel and attempts to motivate them, can you think of
Page 5
5
anything stronger in economic life and in business life than a motivated
personnel which reaches the set goals? I can’t…’
In this version, the soft issues, such as motivating the personnel, turn out to be the
hard issues because they contribute to achieving the right and productive activity. In
other words, they are means by which goals are reached and therefore equally
important as other tools that are used in achieving goals. Thus, the soft issues can be
rhetorically detached from humanistic values and repositioned as a part of the rational
management thinking, according to which the softness of motivation and other human
themes no longer directly threaten the managerial ideology of effectiveness.
Another way to react to this juxtaposition was to interpret the soft side as belonging to
the employees’ coping at work. In this connection, the speakers often made use of the
wider ‘well being at work’ discourse, according to which a person is an entity whose
capacity is defined not only by knowledge and skills, but also by mental and physical
health (e.g. Cooper & Cartwright 1994; Sparks, Faragher & Cooper 2001). Excessive
exertion and exhaustion prevent the development of other competences, which is why
the wellness of individuals needs to be taken systematically into account. The
argument is that coping at work to a tolerable extent is not something that can be
taken care of at once but requires constant observation and development just as much
as in the case of building up knowledge and skills. The speakers made direct
references to a certain kind of ‘holistic’ idea of man, on the basis of which the needs
for development do not appear hierarchically, proceeding from basic needs towards
higher creative personal aspirations, but in various ways according to the context.
But, to back a bit, what, then, is the relationship of hard HRM to an employee as an
individual? Personnel managers interpreted the hard side as the employer’s method to
measure an individual’s input and to set goals, instead of seeing it as a common law in
the market economy according to which the seller of the product is in a weaker
position than the buyer of the product. This in turn led to the conclusion that the hard
HRM actually is a part of the fair play in an organization, because it defines
objectively the goals and rewarding principles for each individual.
Personnel management as a routine and as a way of learning
Another tension that was used in the phrasing of the interview questions was the
division into the routines and innovation in personnel management. As has been
pointed out, the idea of HRM is to detach the personnel activities from the
administration mentality and the bureaucratic routines. The opposite of operative
status is the adhesion of HRM to strategic visions and the reform of organization.
However, to define the role of human resources as strategic is in contradiction with
the fact that it is very likely for the HR function to continue to be appreciated for
smoothly taking care of the ‘inherent’ practices, as for example Ulrich (1997)
implicitly acknowledges in his model of the multiple roles of HR.
In the material provided by the interviews, the managers addressed the division by
declaring that their wish was to make the operative processes work without any
unnecessary control. The managers presented two versions: in the first, they attempted
to remove the difficult tasks from personnel management either by automating them,
or by making them the line managers’ responsibility. In the second, they found that
Page 6
6
certain HR issues are better taken care of by the managers themselves, as routines
nonetheless.
Let us now take a closer look at the first version, in which the futility of routines
becomes emphasized as well as the wish to transfer the routines to someone else’s
responsibility. For instance, various data systems can be used to take care of the
routines. Among others, a personnel manager of a state-owned company stressed this:
‘If I could make a wish, it would of course be that these personnel
management processes could be handled so smoothly that they wouldn’t
really disturb the everyday life: so that we could concentrate more – like
my opinion on this is – more on this kind of strategic contemplation…’
It is worth noticing that the speaker contrasts everyday life with administrative
processes. The division is slightly different from the operative-strategic -division in
which the operative expressly signifies the day-to-day managerial work (Ulrich 1997),
whereas the ‘strategic’ signifies the development of long range planning. In other
words, in such case the administrative routines, when they are not working smoothly,
they intervene the everyday awareness and disrupt the management thinking that
occurs naturally. In fact, the underlying assumption appears to be that the manager’s
work is mostly planning on an abstract level, whereas the employee’s responsibility is
to be available for solving the ‘mundane’ problems. The idea of mental and manual
work was, of course, one of the leading principles in the classic management theories,
and it also legitimated a hierarchy between the managers and the managed (Morgan
1997, Ch. 2.; Grey 1999).
At any rate, most often the avoiding of routines was associated with the wish to get
rid of the commonplaceness of administration and the obstacles ensuing it. The
managers’ wish was that if the routines could be handled smoothly, more time could
be invested in the contemplation of aims and company policies from the HR
perspective. What distinguished this version from the former one was that routine was
considered as something that did not literally distract the manager’s ability to
concentrate but as a time-consuming and mechanistic activity nonetheless. A lot of
focus was put on the new technology: for instance, nowadays work applications can
be accepted via the Internet, which was regarded as a considerable help in reducing
the amount of papers handled by one unit.
The rallying point for versions concerning individual routines was that in each version
routines were considered as something less valuable but necessary nonetheless; as
something for which an efficient solution had to be discovered in order to be realized.
What became apparent above all was that routines do not belong to the central tasks
of HR experts but represent the lower priorities in their task domain, this implying
that HR is not to be exclusively identified with administrative mechanics.
Managers and others as targets of development
The HRM model underlines the role of line management as the executing force of
development and even raises the managerial readiness and personnel competence of
business managers above the formal personnel systems in importance. However,
Page 7
7
focusing exclusively on the managerial stratum leaves the shop floor level labour
processes in the shadow and may elicit doubts about how equally HRM is in fact
committed to the development of every member in an organization. The respondents
seemed to find this question fairly easy to handle. Given that the question was
formulated in such a manner that it included a reference to the educational degree of
the managers in relation to the other personnel, it was understandable that the theme
was first discussed from the educational point of view. The respondents discussed the
development investment aimed at managers in a similar manner, as numeric facts that
is:
‘If I, for instance, think about us and the way we are educated and
trained, we have a very old personnel development investment aimed at
people who work in customer service, so that’s not exactly the way I
would see it. Let’s take a closer look: we have the superiors and then we
have the people in customer service: if assessed on an annual level how
much has been invested on one person per day and how much it’s in
Finnish marks, we can claim that the training situation is pretty good.’
To objectively handle the relevance of education for managers and others was a
preliminary, but not a sufficient response for the tension initiated by the interviewers.
The personnel managers still continued with rhetorically capable arguments and
conceptual formulations. The respondents found various operational solutions to
diminish the hierarchical difference between managers and others, while
simultaneously trying to maintain the image of management as generally ‘good’ and
desired characteristic.
One of the arguments how to narrow down the distance between managers and others
was that the border between managers and employees is, in fact, fading in the
knowledge intensive organizations (Grey 1999). All the more often managers are sorts
of experts, because without substantial knowledge about the products, technologies
and human behaviour the management of others or achieving surplus value in the
markets is not possible. Therefore, not even the top management can participate solely
in general organizing, but in fact operates already in the ‘actual business life’ and its
specialisms. On the other hand, managerial competence could be seen as an
increasingly inherent part of the normal skills requirements of each knowledge worker
and that leadership even in the team based and boundaryless contexts is by definition
‘shared’ and not so much hierarchical. As an outcome, the HR managers’ discourse
succeeded in separating ‘management’ from its connotations with elite. Table 1
evinces the rhetorically successful themes.
Page 8
8
Table 1. The discussed contradictions and their interpretations offered
by the personnel manager: themes where authority was successfully
accomplished.
Theme
Offered interpretation
Version of reality / organization
Personnel
management is both
hard and soft
-
Soft issues are central in
making profit
-
Hard issues support the
objective setting of goals and
equitable evaluation of
performance
-
Personnel management
supports the profitability
of organization through
both soft and hard issues,
keeping in mind the
entirety
Personnel
management is both
routines and
innovations
-
Personnel managers attempt
to concentrate on long-term
development
-
Routines can be automated
and technologized
-
Routines can be removed
from the HR persons’ job
description
-
Personnel management is
executing and developing
the strategy of an
organization, but also
routines belong to it
-
Routines are taken care of
separate from the actual,
change-centred work of
the HR managers
Manager and
employees as the
targets of the HRM
services such as
training
-
Managers and others are the
targets of equal amounts of
training investment
-
Managers today are
knowledge workers as well
-
Management is a part of every
employee’s work process
-
There is no essential
division between the
executives and the rest of
the personnel
-
Management skills are
central and are developed
throughout the
organization
When tactics fail
The themes introduced above surfaced from the research material in that they were
successful accomplishments of a power position; in other words, they enabled the
personnel manager to retain his/her authorial position. Now we shall examine those
discursive tensions in which the managers seem to loose control of their position in
varying degrees.
The personnel manager as the formulator and implementer of strategy
Page 9
9
One of the emphases in strategic management is to see the situation of the
organization as an abstract contemplation. Even the research literature uses frequently
terms such as ‘framing’ or ‘sense-making’ to describe the strategic decision-making
and leadership (Ternbrusel et al 1999). The texts stress the strategy work as a critical
thinking process and implicitly emphasize that there is a certain kind of practical
theorist in the figure of the strategist. One can, in fact, assume that the personnel
manager who identifies with the strategy discourse is likely and willing to stress that
side of his/her job in which testing different and crafting of the large-scale schemes
are being the in the forefront.
However, although the managers often saw this as part of their life, the knowledge
creation aspect was mostly presented as a future ideal. As they engaged with the
question of how they currently spend their time and what they do during a regular
workday, producing the figure of a strategist was more difficult. For instance, a
manager from the service branch points out:
‘Consider, for instance, what sorts of things are being emphasised at
work these days: one could pick up a few things which are big issues on
the entire corporate level, for instance the securing of our competencies
is one issue that is reflected to many, many things and then there is this
looking forward thing… you know, the competition for the good
employees… Then of course there are all these reward-related things
that have to do with how to keep the employees in the firm …’
The areas, which are mentioned (competencies, recruitment and rewards), can be
defined strategic in that they are the long-term development issues. On the other hand,
however, they are not issues that directly have to do with the strategy formulation not
are they questions about how to conceptualize organization as a systemic whole.
Rather, what is put forward as the HR role is the implementation of a strategy that has
been formulated elsewhere. Although formulation/implementation is but it is not
difficult to discern the hierarchy implicit in the division: it is logical that those who
put the strategy into practice come after those who formulate the strategy.
In addition, in a wider sense the managers’ relationship with the managerial
knowledge appeared as problematic. Appealing to the specialist skills and knowledge
when producing expertise is a central element; for instance, the position of being a
professional is often directly connected to a university degree and the monopoly of
knowledge (e.g. Larson 1977). However, in the interviews formal knowledge did not
surface as a particularly argumentative resource. The personnel specialists brought up
their impressions about ‘theory’ but did not really refer to any acknowledged
behavioural theories or business paradigms in their efforts to define organizational
reality (cf. Watson & Harris 1999). The role of formal knowledge seemed to be quite
obscure to a number of respondents, and in many cases, theory was deemed as
damaging for the performance in a managerial role. For instance, the service company
manager first emphasised the role of strategic reflection in her work, but then
continued by comparing the international practitioner conferences with the domestic
events:
‘…When you go to a seminar in Finland, they are often really fancy
occasions, people are talking in such a posh way that they don’t know
Page 10
10
themselves what they’re saying … In American seminars people usually
discuss the issues on a really concrete level… you get plenty of good
ideas (from there) and you find yourself thinking that ah! that’s one way
to do it. You sit at a round table and discuss how we do things and how
you do things and how this could be developed into something new…’
The argument is that the value of pondering upon strategic philosophy cannot be
found from sophisticated knowledge, but from the development of concrete
applications and the sharing of practical insights in informal occasions. The managers
tended to position themselves so that knowledge remains outside their managerial
actions, as a sort of a heuristic tool without any independent value on its own. In this
way, theory is not useable in the truth claims, which could strengthen the position of
the personnel specialist.
The uniqueness and universality of HRM
The relationship of the personnel managers with managerial knowledge is closely
related to the tension between the local uniqueness of HRM and the global
universality of it. There is a potential dilemma in the dualism since if the manager
emphasizes the universal validity of the models used in his/her organization, the
sensibility to understand the inimitable qualities of one’s own organization is
endangered. On the other hand, in professional circles the core know-how cannot be
described by using simply the local discourse, but the ‘competencies’ of a firm must
be translated to a wider collegial audience by terms employed in the managerial
discourse.
In the interviews, some controversy between the opposites seemed to emerge when
the respondents talked about the values of an organization. To an extent, values
appeared in the HR managers’ talk as cultural norms, which can be flexibly
transmitted to individuals in order to be internalised as scripts for social action.
However, it is difficult to see how such common themes as ‘quality’ or ‘ putting
people first’ can guide individuals to expressly function in accordance with ‘our way’
of working, when more ore less the same themes are offered in nearly every
organization. The universality prevails here and threatens uniqueness highlighted in
the accounts. Time to time, some corrections were made about the universality of
values by evoking the way they were connected to the lived reality of an organization.
In these comments the written values of an organization were deemed as
generalizations, whereas the actual value process occurred as a part of an inner
dialogue on the identity of the organization. Accordingly, like this the uniqueness of
personnel management becomes realized through values, which ensues from the
search and construction of identity inside the organization. The problem that remains
is that actually, as became clear from the detailed descriptions of the ‘value
conversations’, ‘values’ have first been written down by the management after which
one undertakes to process them without questioning the political biases of the frames.
Another issue that disclosed the contradiction between uniqueness and universality
was how the informants were disposed towards the information provided by networks.
Membership in wider networks was in many ways regarded as an acceptable thing by
a number of specialists, but simultaneously, the commitment to the beliefs produced
Page 11
11
by networks may be rhetorically problematic. Institutional connections strengthen the
identification with the common models and norms of management, which contradict
the idea about the manager—and the personnel manager in particular—being the
expert of an organization.
In many answers, the managers discussed in a fairly positive way the role of the
cooperative relations modifying the professional identity. For instance, in questions
concerning the wages the cooperation between competitors was not considered as a
threat. One of the managers mentioned that bringing up the global market leader of
the branch as an example gives further emphasis for the plans of a personnel manager
when grounding various suggestions for action for the superiors in one’s own
organization. The reference contains an implication about the norm of success created
in the field, which can be used in arguing for the advantages of one’s own methods or
solutions. Another thing that implies the appreciation of globality is that the
respondents expressed rather unreservedly their confidence on the international
management knowledge. Three interviewees mentioned the name of Dave Ulrich
(1997) and his model of organizing personnel management. In addition, international
consultants were often referred to as the source of information and the channel of new
thinking.
Moreover, another interesting feature was that the professional cooperation mentioned
was in no way necessarily limited to the exchange of industry recipes but was pictured
as the invention and sharing of the universal professional problems. Many pointed out
the loneliness of the job and the difficulty to find partners from inside one’s own
organization. In the answers the common way to see the problems regardless of their
context seemed to help the managers identify with their HR colleagues. Thus, finding
and construing the problems that can be generalized and transferred appeared as the
most important function in the professional cooperation. It seems that, overall,
establishing the problems would appear to be at least as equally important than
outlining solutions and making productive decisions as one’s task as a HR manager.
However, the discover of the global objects of attention is again in contradiction with
the emphasis put on the uniqueness and inimitability of the organization’s most
valuable assets and resources, and makes the HR persons vulnerable to become
accountable to the truths of the recent competence and resource based discourses of
strategy.
The personnel manager as proactive and reactive
Another thematic that can be derived from strategy literature is the balancing between
proactive and reactive mode of action. The division is close to the concept pair of
strategy formulation and implementation, but it is more clearly oriented towards the
manager’s individual way of thinking and beliefs. Again, the distinction between the
passive and the active is mutually exclusive and normative: the active is easily
understood as a ‘good’ thing while the passive appears as, as a consequence,
Page 12
12
something less desirable. For instance, in the category of Miles and Snow (1978) the
phlegmatic ‘defender’ strategy is the opposite of the active ‘prospector’ orientation.
Indeed, it would appear to be clearly beneficial if the personnel manager could
categorize the work he/she does as proactive, as seeking for new competitive assets
instead of succumbing to passive administration. The interviewed personnel managers
often stressed the planning dimension of their work, as an indication of the strategy-
likeness of the HR activity. In this connection, the idea of proactivity came forward in
the form of the images where the manager looks into the future instead of struggling
with problems of the present. The HR experts told how they were involved in charting
the changes that need to be made in the work force of a company and in the human
qualifications required for sustaining innovativeness. The theme was important and it
was referred to as the common trend, as can be heard in the extract from the interview
of the service company manager:
‘Of course, in my opinion, the enduring focus of the personnel
manager’s work … it is evident that it’s always on the search of new
things, development of new things, and less and less on taking care of
the routines.’
However, in many opening addresses, it became obvious that what seemed to hinder
becoming a proper strategist was the managers’ responsibility towards their own
departments. The HR managers’ argument seemed to be that their executive role
assigned them the burden to watch over the operations of the personnel function,
despite that the HR is supposed be more and more every leader’s responsibility.
At the same time, however, the supposedly formal role as the head of the ‘operative’
personnel tasks was perceived as a challenging area of problematics, which seemed to
reflect the HR managers’ own idea of his or her core knowledge as an organizational
professional. The managers namely spent considerable time to explain the nature of
the human problems that distorted the smooth running of the organizational processes.
These included the phenomena such as stress, work related illness and psychological
dissatisfaction at work, but also more bodily conditions such as alcoholism.
Thus, although the HR managers intended to picture their involvement with the well-
being issues as organizationally determined by their formal responsibilities, they were
keen to engage intensively with the betterment of the subject at work, a key theme in
the attainment of a managerial authority within the humanistic organizational
discourse (O’ Connor 1999). However, the possibilities of the Human Relations ideas
for the privilege of HRM as a managerial knowledge system were downplayed with
the acceptance of the primacy of the strategic visioning for the identity project of the
HR manager.
Apart from the excursions into the employee behaviour, even the descriptions that
were meant to be proactive entailed restrictions in the form of an enactment of a
cyclic structure that cannot really be considered as being the strategic agency
emphasized in the management discourse. The speakers frequently found it easier to
tell about the development work via a reference to the activity that formed a part of
the general developing and reporting round of a company. Among others, the
Page 13
13
professional services company manager maintained that being the person who handles
the reports proves the role the personnel function in inventing the future:
‘It’s not enough that HR collects the information and then puts it on the
table saying that here are the figures and this is what everything looks
like, because it’s only then the other side of the work gets started;
pouring over how this information relates to the objectives, and
conclusions and analyses are drawn from it. This is how you start to
think how we can take another step forward..’
Even though the idea is to make a difference from the traditional reporting mode, the
short-term need for planning is emphatically present in the account. Indeed, it is the
interpretation of the past events that is strongly present when future directions are
being decided. This could be taken to mean that regardless of its strategic tendencies,
the personnel function is oriented towards the future mainly on the basis of the present
situation, observing the restrictions and boundary conditions implicit in action. This
also included the ideas about the societal trends and economic cycles and the way
they should be taken into account when crafting the strategic direction for the
corporation. All in all, it seemed that despite the intentions to become identified with
the proactive, forward- and outward-looking type of action, the proactiveness the HR
managers attached to their own role in the organization was mainly a matter of
attending to the regularized planning processes and pre-given objectives.
The themes related to the tactical moments when authority was not accomplished are
summarized in table 2.
Page 14
14
Table 2. The discussed contradictions and the interpretations offered to them by
personnel manager II: themes where authority was lost.
Theme
Offered interpretation
Version of truth about
organization
Personnel manager as the
formulator and the
implementer of strategy
-
Personnel manager
participates in the
strategy work
-
Role of the personnel
manager is to offer
means to the pre-given
ends
-
Personnel manager
applies the managerial
knowledge into practice
-
Personnel manager is the
implementer of strategic
vision
-
Personnel manager
consumes the managerial
knowledge produced and
tailored by others
Uniqueness and universality
of the HRM knowledge
-
HMR knowledge is
global by nature, but
often too general for
the company
-
The personnel
manager’s own abstract
understanding is
irrelevant
-
In its professionalism,
the personnel manager
prefers to rely on the
outside rather than the
inside of an organization
-
Professionalism of HRM
does not discuss with the
uniqueness of an
organization
Personnel manager as a
proactive and reactive worker
-
Proactivity is realized
in the orientation
toward the future and
the planning of it
-
HRM is expert in
human problems but
these are not proactive
tasks
-
HRM follows the
regularized process of
planning and accounting
-
HRM focuses on
problems, not in new
possibilities
-
Personnel management
is basically reactive
Page 15
15
CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of the paper was to investigate the power position of the HR managers
as an effect of discourse and local performance. I examined the way in which the
definitions of the organizational forms by the HR people give rise to a particular
power relation between the HR professionals and other actors. Instead of finding
myself out how various dualisms and distinctions constitute organizational relations, I
let the lay actors (in this case, the HR managers, me and the graduate student) to do
the boundary work that I then re-ordered and re-presented to help me to debate with
the research community. Applying the concept of accountability, the themes whose
treatment supported the appearance of an authority position for the HR expert in the
interview were distinguished in the analysis from those instances where the personnel
managers emerged as being accountable to the significant others.
The ‘problematic’ discursive formulations emerged in connection with the themes that
engaged with the formulation vs. the implementation of strategy, the universality vs.
the uniqueness of HRM and reactivity and proactivity of the personnel work. The
resulting ‘classification’ into ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ themes in the HR managers’
struggle for authority can of course be further organized and reduced in a number of
ways. My suggestion is to see a major difference here in terms of the type of relation
that is being negotiated and ordered in each of the two categories. The themes from
which the HR managers tended to come out as being in control all engage with
organization as a thing or an entity ‘out there’, whereas the places that were connected
to the loss of authority, in turn, seemed to draw the HR expert into the organizing
process as a subjective participant.
When inserting their identity to the organizational forms proposed, the managers
seemed to try at the outset to portray an image of normalness by picturing their
identification with the desired aspects of management (proactiveness, strategy
making, uniqueness). Yet at the same time they did so by emphasizing their legacy as
a community of organization behaviour and well-being specialists. Such identification
implies a gap between the real and the ideal and performs a subject position as a
lacking other of the all-powerful, male policy makers from the ‘tough’ disciplines of
accounting, finance and strategic management. It thus seems that while HR
management has been inserted into the executive agenda as a way of seeing the
‘whole’, and although the HR managers are competent in animating the authorial
voice of the strategy-HRM discourse, the HR professional still constitutes himself or
herself as being halfway between operational and strategic management. Internalising
the division between strategy and non-strategy as a personal problem makes the HR
manager accountable to the ‘real’ corporate professions, and can lead into a more
fixed ‘loss of power’ in organization.
Page 16
16
References:
Alasuutari, P. (1995) Researching culture: qualitative methods and cultural studies.
London: Sage.
Armstrong, P. (1995) Accountancy and HRM. In : Storey, J. (ed.) HRM – a critical
text. London: Routledge.
Beer, M, Lawrence, P.R., Mills. D. & Walton, R.E. (1985) Human Resource
Management. New York: Free Press.
Boxall, P. & Purcell, J. (2003) Strategy and Human resource management. London:
Palgrave.
Cooper, C.L. and Cartwright, S. (1994) Healthy mind, healthy organization – a
proactice approach to organizational stress. Human Relations, 47(4): 455-76.
Fombrun, C., Tichy, N.M. & Devanna M.A. (eds.) (1984) Strategic Human Resource
Management. New York : John Wiley.
Foucault, M. (1982) Subject and power. In: Rabinow, P. and Dreyfus, H. Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago : The University of
Chicago Press.
Galang, M.C. and Ferris, G.R. (1997). ‘Human Resource Department Power and
Influence through Symbolic Action’. Human Relations, 50, 1403-1426.
Gratton, L., Hope-Hailey, V., McGovern, B., Stiles, P. & Truss, C. (1999) Strategic
Human Resource Management : Corporate rhetoric and human realities.
Oxford:Oxford University Press.
Grey, C. (1999) We are all managers now/We always were: On the development and
demise of management. Journal of Management Studies 36(5): 561-86.
Heritage, J. (1996) Garfinkel ja etnometodologia (Garfinkel and
ethnomethodology)(in Finnish). Helsinki : Gaudeamus.
Jacques, R. (1999) Developing a tactical approach to engaging with ‘Strategic HRM’.
Organization, 6:199-222.
Larson, M. (1977) The rise of professionalism. A sociological analysis. Berkley, CA:
University of California Press.
Latour, B. (1986). The Powers of Association. In J. Law (Ed.) Power, Action and
Belief: a New Sociology of Knowledge?. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and
KeganPaul.32:264-280.
Latour, B. (1997) On actor-network theory: a few clarifications.
www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/stt/ant/latour.htm (read 5.6.97)
Lee, N. & Hassard, J. (1999) Organization Unbound; Actor-Network Theory,
Research Strategy and Institutional Flexibility. Organization 6(3):391-404.
Legg, K. (1995) Human resource management. Rhetorics and realitites.
London:Macmillan.
Marginson, P., Armstrong, P., Edwards,P. and Purcell, J. (1993) The control of
industrial relations in large companies: an initial analysis of the second company
level industrial relations survey. No 45. Coventry: University of Warwick.
Miles,R. & Snow, C. (1978) Organizational Strategy, Structure and Process. New
York:McGraw-Hill.
Millward, N., Bryson, A. & Forth, J. (2000) All change at work: British employment
1980-1998 as portrayed by the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Series.
London: Routledge.
Morgan, G. (1997) Images of Organization. London:Sage.
Page 17
17
Munro, R. (1997) Introduction: Ideas of difference: stability, social spaces and the
labour of division. In: Hetherington, K. & Munro, R. Ideas of difference. Social
spaces and the labour of division. pp: 3-24. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Munro, R. (1999) Power and discretion: Membership work in the time of technology.
Organization. 6(3): 429-50.
O’ Connor, E. (1999) Minding the workers: the meaning of ‘human’ and ‘human
relations’ in Elton Mayo. Organization 6(2): 223-46.
Peräkylä, A. (1998) Authority and accountability. The delivery of diagnosis in
primary health care. Social Psychology Quarterly. 61(4): 301-20
Purcell, J. (1995) Corporate strategy and its link with human resource management
strategy, in Storey, J., (ed) Human resource management: a critical text. London:
Routledge.
Sparks, K., Faragher, B. and Cooper, C.L. (2001) Well-being and occupational health
in the 21
st
century workplace. Journal of Occupational and Organizational
Psychology, 74:489-509.
Ternbusel, A., Galvin, T., Neale, M.& Bazerman, M. (1999) Cognitions in
organizations. In : Managing Organizations. Clegg, Hardy & Nord (eds.), pp 63-87.
London:Sage.
Townley, B. (1994) Reframing Human Resource Management. London : Sage.
Ulrich, D. (1997) Human resource champions. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School
Press.
Watson, T.J. & Harris, P. (1999) The Emergent Manager. London : Sage.
No comments:
Post a Comment