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Ethical Analyses of HRM: A Review and Research Agenda

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Abstract

The very idea of human resource management raises ethical considerations: What does it mean to us as humans for human beings to be managed as resources? Intriguingly, the field of ethics and HRM remains underdeveloped. Current approaches to HRM fail to place ethical considerations as their central warrant. This article, building on Greenwood (J Bus Ethics 36(3):261–279, 2002), argues for a deeper analysis of ethical issues in HRM, indeed for a differentiated ethical perspective of HRM that sets normative deliberations as its prime task. By identifying a distinct ethical approach to HRM that is unashamedly normative and socio-politically embedded, two objectives can be achieved. First, mainstream and critical approaches will be challenged to take ethical issues in HRM more seriously. Second, a dedicated forward-looking research agenda for the ethical analysis of HRM will be advanced.

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Notes

  1. Use of the term “ethical” in this manner assumes a narrow definition of “ethics” as the systematic study of reasoning about how we ought to act (Singer 1994) rather than a broad definition of ethics as set of norms or morals (and hence is not synonymous with the terms “moral” or “morals”). By reflecting on the nature and justification of moral actions we “introduce clarity, substance and precision of argument into the domain of morality” (Beauchamp et al. 2008, p. 2) and eschew an uncritical acceptance of preconceived notion of right and wrong. Importantly there is no suggestion whatsoever that an ethical perspective is in and of itself moral or morally superior.

  2. It should be noted that the term normative is used in this article in the philosophical sense to mean how things should or ought to be (which things are good or bad, which actions are right or wrong) rather than the lay usage to mean establishing or deriving from a standard (as a synonym of “universal”) as appears in much HRM literature (see, for example, Thompson 2011, p. 358).

  3. See Footnote 1.

  4. The journals—Human Resource Management (US) published three articles, Human Resource Management (UK) published 0 articles and International Journal of Human Resource Management published five articles—were selected based on the UK Association of Business Schools Ranking 2010 and the Australian Research Council ERA ranking 2010.

  5. Both of these articles were published in the International Journal of Human Resource Management.

  6. The terms unitarist, pluralist and radical refers to the ideological/theoretical perspective of work place relations coined by Fox (1966). Pluralism here has a specific meaning and is different to ethical pluralism discussed subsequently.

  7. Acknowledgement and thanks are given to a blind reviewer on this article for valuable insights into the contribution of US industrial relations scholarship.

  8. The degree to which the “contract” has been entered freely, however, is open to scrutiny as many classes of workers (e.g., “sweat shop” workers in developing countries or home workers) may “voluntarily” enter employment relationships in which they have no capacity to vary their employment conditions (Van Buren 2001).

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Acknowledgments

I have benefitted from several valuable conversations about these ideas and thank, in particular, Ed Freeman, Andreas Scherer, and Jan Schapper.

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  1. Department of Management, Monash University, Box 11e, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Michelle Greenwood

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Greenwood, M. Ethical Analyses of HRM: A Review and Research Agenda. J Bus Ethics 114, 355–366 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1354-y

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