Resisting the Rhetoric of the ‘HRM Paradigm’ in Managerial Practice:
Reality Bites Back
David. A. Vickers (davickers@uclan.ac.uk) and Stephen Fox
University of Lancaster
HRM may have become co-terminus with the new managerialism in the rhetorical
orthodoxies of the HRM textbooks and other platforms for its professional claims. However,
we have detailed case-study data suggesting that the managerial practice of HRM indicates
that HRM practices can be much more complicated, nuanced and indeed resistive within
organizational settings.
Using actor-network theory, we analyse practices of managerial resistance and counterenrolment through which an unofficial network of managers used formal HRM systems and
procedures to successfully counteract the official strategy of the firm, which was to close a
substantial chemicals plant. As a consequence, this network of middle managers effectively
changed top management strategy and did so through official HRM practices, coupled with
other actor-network-building processes, arguably for the ultimate benefit of the organization,
though against the views of the top management of the time. Similar to the work of Dalton
(1959a) the paper finds that managers lower down the organisation adapt and change the
strategy in order that ‘it works’.
One of the authors was a senior manager at a factory (‘Burnsland’) and also engaged in
‘overt’ participant observation for eighteen months. The research shows how the organisation
(‘Chemco’) attempted to use performance related pay, appraisals, career succession and
general day-to-day counselling as tools to get managers to show commitment to the agenda.
This is consistent with the idea of managerialism as the pursuit of organisational efficiency at
all costs (Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 12). Managers were told by the Site Manager to be
‘good foot soldiers’ and to ‘trust their leadership’. In addition some were told that they ‘could
have a good career ahead of them’ with the implication that they could choose to commit to
the agenda. One manager, who challenged the organisation, was told that his job would
disappear and would be relocated. This left him in an untenable position and he decided to
leave but this also strengthened the resolve of other managers and became the catalyst
prompting them to establish an unofficial network. These managers were then able to resist
top management pressures and draw upon their unofficial network of fellow managers, trade
unions, the Press and local politicians to push back against the top management agenda. We
conclude by drawing implications for the so-called orthodox ‘HRM paradigm’ suggesting that
rather than seeking to eliminate management resistance, HRM professionals should seek to
understand it and develop greater levels of participation, consultation and consensus-building
in strategic decision-making. We suggest that ‘managerialism’ is too simplistic an ideology
for HR managers and that the orthodox ‘HRM paradigm’ needs to change to better reflect the
complexities and dilemmas of HR working practices.
1. Introduction
It can be argued that HRM is part of ‘managerialism’, which some critical scholars have
argued involves a ‘social engineering role’ role for management in order to maximise a sense
of harmony and belonging amongst the employees of the firm, reducing conflict and
producing an ‘orderly whole’ (Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 12). They see this as a form of
‘rational efficiency’ which vests the ‘logical basis of action’ with the manager, while
employees who restrict or oppose such action are held to be ‘acting irrationally’. It is not the
pursuit of efficiency which is managerialist but the presumption that effectiveness and
efficiency are simply synonymous with management effectiveness and efficiency; the idea
that the management have a monopoly on these very common organisational goals. Parker
(2002: 10) calls ‘managerialism’ the ‘generalized ideology of management’ which we might
think of as the view which supports and tries to legitimise management holding a monopoly
on rationality and the logic and techniques of effectiveness and efficiency. We broadly agree
with these arguments made by Thompson and McHugh and by Parker, although we point out
the obvious fact that the very idea of ‘managerialism’ is a generalisation which broadly
assumes a unitary management group seeking to act upon the other stakeholders (e.g.
employees, customers, suppliers, investors) and we think it might often appear that just such a
unified group does exist in this or that organisation and possibly in society at large. But the
question of the existence of such a unified group is open to empirical study. And many of the
studies of managerial work suggest that in particular ethnographic cases, management does
not always operate as a cohesive group within an organisation (Dalton, 1959a; Watson, 1994).
Rather management groups are fractured along functional, professional, hierarchical,
geographical and cultural lines amongst others. Within these divisions of management labour
is the functional area of HRM, for which the CIPD acts as the major public representative in
the UK. And it has not always been regarded as even part of management, let alone the
ideology of managerialism.
Personnel emerged as a welfare function acting as a brake on the worst employment practices
of private companies, supported by society, legislation and the more philanthropic end of the
capitalist spectrum. Personnel managers, like other professionals, tended to be loyal to their
professional codes first and their employer second. Just as an accountant who bent the
accounting rules for the convenience of upper management risked sanction by the profession,
the same was true of personnel managers. Personnel managers had responsibility for making
their employers treat employees within the employment law. For this, they were sometimes
regarded by other managers as not part of the management team, and many commentators
pointed out personnel was not where the power is in an organisation (Legge, 1978).
The shift from personnel management to HRM in the 1980s brought about a change in both
the rhetoric and reality of the personnel profession, though the extent of the change in reality
is open to some debate. We will examine some of the literature on this issue in the next
section. The wider argument of this paper is that HRM practices need careful empirical study
and such studies need to be informed by relevant social methods and theoretical perspectives.
In terms of methods, longitudinal studies of cases are required simply in order to document
and describe how HR practices work in practice because HR practices work on long cycles of
activity. Whether a new performance management system, or job evaluation system, for
instance, makes a difference to organisational effectiveness and efficiency is not something
that becomes clear in a single year, so longitudinal research is needed on a case by case basis.
A more contentious issue concerns the kind of theory or perspective needed to frame the data
collection and analysis. In considering the theoretical options, a basic question is whether to
assume that HRM is part of a unified management group justified by a managerialist ideology
or not. We think that HR practices need to be studied without making this presumption.
However, we think that the study of specific HRM practices cannot proceed without
understanding them within a socially situated organisational context, including its relations
with other managers and management groups and their activities. This paper will present one
such case study. Both authors have experience of working in HRM and one of them
conducted the longitudinal study which we report here, which is based on eighteen months of
participant observation in a large operating unit of an international chemicals firm which was
bought from the parent company by another international chemicals firm during the period of
study.
The case we present concerns the developing relationships between the new top management,
the HR manager and various senior and middle managers in commercial, production and
operational management. Given that the question of a unified management legitimated by an
ideology of managerialism is an issue for research, rather than a presumption in this study, we
wanted a theoretical perspective which would be open to the possibility that (a) such a unity
existed or (b) did not exist or (c) was being produced with some difficulty in the course of
post-acquisition management processes, or (d) was being dismantled in the course of the very
same post-acquisition processes. Accordingly we turned to actor-network theory (ANT)
which does not presume the existence of a macro-actor but rather asks how macro-actors are
socially constructed and destroyed over time. ANT does not presume that management is
unified, but it offers concepts through which we may analyse attempts to enrol managers into
a unified whole and attempts to resist and subvert such manoeuvres. The study will focus on
the role of the HR manager in these processes and our discussion will draw implications for
the kinds of critical study of HRM which we think are needed.
The paper will proceed in the following way: section 2 will examine the debates on HRM and
the critical study of HRM found in the literature. Section 3 will briefly and selectively present
some of the main actor-network concepts we will use in our analysis of the case. Section 4
will present ‘Burnsland’ the case study using concepts from actor-network theory to interpret
the ethnographic data. In section 5 we discuss the case in relation to the question of how to
critically study HRM. Finally in section 6 we draw conclusions from this study and suggest
ways forward for research.
2. Literature
Academic writing on Human Resource Management literature is dominated by what Legge
(1995a) has labelled ‘normative models’ (e.g. Fombrun et al, 1984; Beer and Spector, 1985;
Walton, 1985; Hendry and Pettigrew, 1986). Legge (1995a: 3) describes this normative
approach as being concerned with the “optimum utilisation of human resources in pursuit of
organisational goals”. Guest (1990) considers the cultural issues of the ‘American dream’
which underpin HR in the US. The dream is based on three key strands – the potential for
human growth, a desire to improve career opportunities for people at work and the
“reinforcement of the importance of strong leadership, a kind of rugged entrepreneurial
individualism… (Guest 1990: 391).” These cultural issues of strong leadership, opportunism
and individual growth were also promoted in the UK HR literature and HR practices during
Thatcherism in the UK. Whilst HR is notoriously difficult to define authors from the
normative perspective argue that HR is about ‘fit’ with strategy (Beer & Spector, 1985),
employee ‘commitment’ (Walton, 1985), the ‘coherent…design…of personnel systems’
(Hendry and Pettigrew, 1986) and ‘integration’ (Guest and Peccei, 1994). Guest (1987: 503)
describes HRM as comprising of “a set of policies designed to maximise organisational
integration, employee commitment, flexibility and the quality of work.” In the UK the current
normative agenda appears to be about finding the “connecting rods between people and
performance” (Purcell et al, 2000: 31) and justifying the contribution of HR to the bottom line
(Patterson et al, 1997; Guest et al, 2000; Boxall and Purcell, 2000; Guest et al 2003). The
normative agenda is even more embedded by the professional body’s (Chartered Institute of
Personnel and Development - CIPD) preoccupation with proving the bottom line link and its
support for human capital measurement (Scarbrough, 2003; IRS, 2004; Kearns et al, 2006;
CIPD, 2006). Whilst the CIPD appears to be focusing on organisational efficiency it hedges
its bets by talking about its traditions of ‘welfare’ and retains the word ‘personnel’ in its title.
Legge (1995a: 4) recognised that the American normative model was ‘unitarist’ (Fox, 1966,
1974) compared with the more ‘pluralistic’ approach in the UK. This distinction is still
present today in some of the normative language in the UK. In HR practice we still hear
expressions such as ‘employee commitment’, ‘the management of culture’ and ‘resistance to
change’. Guest (2001: 1093) says for example that there needs to be “a greater focus on
outcomes of relevance to individual employees” and recognition of “the important position of
employees as stakeholders in their own right”. Similarly, Kinnie et al (2005) argue that best fit
needs to be between employee satisfaction with HR policies and commitment and this is as
important as the fit between HR and business strategy. Whilst there are shades of pluralism in
this language there is still a strong drive from ‘efficiency’ researchers to justify HR’s
contribution to the bottom line and ‘play the financial game’. This is perhaps best
demonstrated by Guest’s (2001: 1093) comments about human capital measurement. He
argues that HR needs to develop more of its own ‘precise’ theories in order that it is not
“colonized by economists”. Thus Guest is more concerned with who has the right to speak on
people management issues than he is in changing the language of efficiency. Keenoy (1999:
5) suggests that strategic HRM is “driven by short-termism and management accountancy”.
This suggests that HR managers find it a challenge to create an alternative to the financial
efficiency discourse of people management. Rather than play the finance game perhaps we
should be questioning it instead?
Apart from the normative model of HR, Legge (1995a) also suggests three other models – the
descriptive-functional model, the critical-evaluative model, and the descriptive-behavioural
model help us to understand HRM. First, the descriptive-functional model lends itself to the
pluralistic approach to HR. There is no predetermined direction for HR but instead the
outcomes it aims for and processes to achieve them are open to negotiation as part of the
employment relationship. Second, the critical-evaluative model starts with the premise that
the employment relationship is not the contractual regulation of equal interests and that the
employer is able to exploit the employee under this relationship. Legge attributes this model
to Watson (1986) and suggests that the model is akin to the radical perspective suggested by
Burrell and Morgan (1979). Finally, the descriptive-behavioural model is concerned with
what personnel managers do and think on the ground. These concerns are about the credibility
of the function and the tensions between caring welfare and financial control. For example,
Watson (1986: 180-183) in describing such ‘ambiguities’ of care versus control in the
personnel managers’ role argues that “to watch a personnel manager operating over a period
of time is to go through a process of constantly wondering whether one is seeing the wielding
of an iron fist in a velvet glove or a velvet fist in an iron glove.” These same welfare-control
dilemmas were also identified by Storey (1992).
Legge and Exley (1975) in a critical study of personnel managers identified the idea of
‘conformist innovators’ and ‘deviant innovators’ which fits well with the controversial nature
of the role. These ideas were further developed by Gowler and Legge in (1986). Conformist
innovation is all about operating in line with top management goals in a highly professional
manner. Deviant innovation may set the agenda and determine what HR goals and priorities
should be irrespective of management. In HR today, the former, potentially equates to
conformists who attempt to justify why they are helping management to achieve the bottom
line and determining how HR can assist strategy. However, deviance might offer the
opportunity to reshape strategic direction or at least allow HR to engage in the initial strategic
shaping process. Legge and Exley (1975) suggest that deviant innovation may involve the
HR practitioner in attempting to move the organisation towards a greater social and/or moral
good rather than assisting the organisation towards top management goals.
Despite these critical considerations of HRM few inroads have been made in stopping the
‘efficiency at all costs’ bandwagon. As Keenoy (1999: 1) notes “…the more researchers have
undermined the normative and descriptive integrity of HRMism (Legge, 1995a, 1995b;
Storey, 1995), the stronger it gets. Either it feeds on its own inadequacies, ambiguities and
seemingly contradictory forms or we, the academics, are failing to grasp what it is and how it
has evolved within the contemporary organisational, political and socio-economic
landscapes”. The dominance of this normative approach in the UK is replicated by the CIPD
and its search for proof of tangible bottom line impact. Despite this drive to reduce everything
to positivistic ‘proof’ even ‘efficiency at all costs’ researchers such as Guest admit that HR is
hard to measure. Guest (1997) argues that theoretical and analytical frameworks need to be
improved in order to make linkages between high commitment/performance practices and
organisational performance. In his later work Guest (Guest et al, 2003) argues that whilst
there have been developments in metrics it was possible to demonstrate a link between
productivity and financial performance with subjective performance measures. Yet his study
of 366 UK companies was unable to establish a similar link between performance and
objective performance measures. Equally, the CIPD (2006; Kearns, 2006) is attempting to
define measurement tools for human capital but prefers a contingent approach as it is difficult
to identify one best practice model.
Harley and Hardy (2004) argue that Guest’s (1999, 2001, 2002, 2003) later work is largescale empirical testing of what constitutes ‘good’ HR. Whilst large-scale empirical testing
appeals to practitioners this type of research often suggests a ‘one size fits all’ solution and
oversimplifies the specific contextual issues faced by businesses. Guest offers these
practitioners models which they can apply and a form of ‘best practice’ that they can attempt
to replicate. However, as Guest (1990: 380) himself argues about the American dream (Guest,
1987), “rhetoric and enthusiasm runs ahead of practice but at the same time influences
practice”.
Watson (2004: 447) has criticised the approach of ‘efficiency’ theorists as “prescriptive,
functionalist and uncritical”. However, he accepts that we need to move beyond the
normative-critical or rhetoric versus reality debates. Instead he proposes a way forward for the
critical perspective on HRM. Watson in his study of ‘Moddens Foods’ argues that we should
explore HRM in situ and concern ourselves with three key areas – how policies come into
being, how strategy is shaped in practice and the politics between managers. This is consistent
with Legge’s (1978: 16) argument that the “complexities and dynamism of real organisations”
are neglected by research. Dalton (1959c: 68) can already be credited with such research into
‘Milo’ where he identified that strategy was altered by subordinates to accommodate changes
in social relations or organisational emergencies. Dalton argues that such alterations were
‘concealed’ by lower-level managers in order to avoid reprisals from more senior managers.
Often this is achieved by the fact that ambiguity allows “varied interpretations” (Dalton
1959a: 110) of the employment relationship. Dalton (1959c: 63) also describes the
cooperation of ‘natural enemies’ (union and management) forming ‘cross cliques’ with
conflicting cross cliques involved in power struggles to maintain or increase a greater share
of rewards from the organisation. In his depiction, individuals and groups are primarily
focused on their own interests rather than those of the organisation. Dalton described how
politics are used skilfully to make the informal behaviours appear as though they are in
harmony with the organisational doctrine and rules. These cliques keep changing and cut
across departmental and other boundaries. He also describes how, in the face of threats of
invasion, departments attempt to aggressively maintain their boundaries. Dalton (1959b:
264-5) describes how informal cliques enable the organisation to operate as they make top
management strategy fit and “hide developing defects of the official doctrine…”
Legge (2001) accepts criticism (Guest, 1999) that much of her critique of the efficiency or
normative agenda is academic rather than empirical. As such the critique is failing to actively
engaging practitioners (Harley & Hardy, 2004; Mueller & Carter, 2005). There are a few
notable exceptions where the efficiency agenda is challenged by research (e.g. Watson 1977,
2004; Storey, 1992). We argue that it is by engaging in qualitative research into HRM that we
can make the alternative versions of HRM accessible and ‘real’ to practitioners. Watson’s
(1977) extensive study used participant observation, informal discussions with practitioners
and over a hundred structured interviews. Watson (1977: 58-60) found personnel managers
felt marginalised by other managers and had difficulty ‘gaining acceptance’, ‘establishing
credibility’, ‘selling the service’ or ‘persuading’. Most personnel managers found there was
ambivalence towards them from other managers and at higher levels personnel managers
experienced conflict. Ambivalence appears to be associated with issue of credibility of
personnel managers as business managers and the perception that they are not helping the
business cause. The conflict appears to be linked to the view of personnel as ‘soft’ due to its
welfare roots. Watson (1977) tells us that the personnel managers in his sample spend a lot of
their time and energy discussing the whole issue of credibility with line managers which is
somewhat surprising for a management function. Perhaps as an outcome of this debate
between HR and its line managers Storey’s (1992) 15 case studies in leading organisations
(e.g. ICI, Rolls Royce, NHS etc) identified that HRM was moving more towards line
managers and away from personnel specialists. Whilst Storey noted distinctive differences in
HR compared with personnel however, some of these changes were related to the changing
nature of the employment relationship rather than a planned move towards HR. studies of this
type (Watson, 1977; Storey, 1992) are still quite rare. As Legge (2001) argues the literature is
dominated by the positivistic or normative agenda that is synonymous with Guest’s work.
She argues that research funding and journal/RAE agendas conspire against critical HR
perspectives. This is combined with an ‘audit culture’ that has negative connotations for
critical academic writing and deviant practical innovations. Legge (2001:31) notes that there
are a number of inconsistencies in the normative research whose outputs and models are
questionable. Whilst Legge describes Purcell (1999) as an empiricist she acknowledges his
attempts at contingency and welcomes his call for qualitative and longitudinal case studies.
Our paper uses an eighteen month case study and is concerned with how HR policies are used
by managers, how strategy is shaped and diverted in practice and the political networks that
managers are engaged in. We also feel that our research is in keeping with Legge’s (1978: 16)
call for critical research that does not neglect the “complexities and dynamism of real
organisations”.
3. Actor-Network Theory
It is not our intention here to give a comprehensive review of the Actor-Network Theory
(ANT) literature, for which the reader is referred elsewhere (e.g. Law, 1991; Michael, 1996;
Law and Hassard, 1999; Czarniawska and Hernes, 2005; Latour, 2005). However, we will
outline the key principles of ANT and explore some of its potential relationships with HRM.
ANT originates from the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and studies of scientists at
work (e.g. Latour, 1987; Law, 1994). An Actor in the ANT sense is an entity, which may
be equally human or nonhuman. As such, ANT gives no a priori preferences to nature,
social or scientific entities. ANT calls this symmetry (Latour, 1987, 1993 and 1994).
Symmetry “seems to blur the boundaries between the human subject and the nonhuman
object (Latour, 1994: 791)”. As McLean and Hassard (2004: 503) point out there can be no
social life without nonhumans.
Actor-Network Theory usually commences at the point of Translation, Interressement and
Enrolment. To explain this with a simplified example – a junior manager with considerable
experience in dealing with voluntary redundancies is able to place him/her self between an
less experienced senior manager and the redundancies (interressement). To ensure that the
senior manager is enrolled the junior manager explains the complexity and difficult of
dealing with the redundancies on a voluntary basis (problematisation). Thus the senior
manager needing to achieve his/her redundancy targets enrols into the junior manager’s
network in order to maintain his/her identity as the senior manager (enrolment). In most
organisational settings the unitarist perspective would suggest that the senior managers do
the enrolling by offering an identity as an employees and through various human resource
processes (e.g. careers, flexible working for ‘core’ workers contractual, financial and nonfinancial rewards etc.). Networks formed in this way “seem to insist on annihilating our
personal experience” (Star, 1991: 48). Indeed Michael (1996) describes enrolment as the
process where the targeted entity is “captured” and “yields”. This process is similar to that
described by Foucault (1979: 27) where “power is exercised rather than possessed, it is not
the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its
strategic positions”. Although Townley’s (1993) concern is with HRM and Foucault rather
than ANT specifically, she makes some pertinent points in relation to ANT and HRM.
Townley (1993: 518) described managerialist HRM as “the black box of production, where
organisational inputs – employees – are selected, appraised, trained, developed, and
remunerated to deliver the required output of labour”. Townley (1993: 528) argues that the
managerialist HRM project is one of ‘rationality’ and of making the ‘spaces in the
employment relationship’ knowable through processes of ranking and classification
(appraisals, job evaluation, assessment ratings) in order to render the relationship
governable.
In ANT terms the managerialist project is aiming to fill in as much of the space within the
network and to control the power of interpretation of policy and procedural meanings to
prevent any unravelling of the network. This is largely achieved by what Starbuck (1992)
calls ‘clear benefit domain’ – in the case of HRM the term ‘benefit’ refers to both perceived
and actual employee benefits. The company offers you what you want then you stay and
offer your ‘commitment and discretionary effort’ (see for example Purcell et al’s (2003)
model funded by the CIPD).
However, in ANT, we must remember that the targeted entity may withdraw from this
enrolment at any stage and the power never actually belongs to the enrolling entity. Power
merely flows through entities involved in the network. As Latour (1988a) points out
“power is the illusion people get when they are obeyed.... [they] discover what their power
is really made of when they start to lose it... it was made of the wills of all the others...
power [is] a consequence and not a cause of collective action”. Legge (2002: 78) argues that
a central actor is always in danger of being taken over by a potential ally and as “such
networks are never completely fixed and stable, but rather fragile and transient and, hence,
require hard work on the part of those who seek…to develop and maintain it”. We will
discuss the implications that this has for unitarist enrolment processes (e.g. performance
related pay, career systems) later in relation to the story of Burnsland.
The process of enrolment is never final and is a snap shot that is liable to change. Thus the
enrolled senior manager in our example above may decide at any point that their identity is
better served by another network of actors and actants and not take the advice of the junior
manager unless, that is, the junior manager can continually work at maintaining the initial
enrolment and stabilise it in some way. Actor-Networks attempt to stabilise themselves and
maintain themselves by making themselves irreversible. Irreversibility is ultimately where
all entities converge and are standardised and normalised to a level of predictability that
they could for all intents and purposes, become a black box “whose behaviour is known and
predicted independently of its context” (Callon, 1991: 52).
Callon (1986) introduced the concept of ‘free association’ as one of the key tenets of ANT.
Free association is the repudiation of a priori distinctions between the social, natural and
scientific/ technological. This idea in turn gives rise to the recognition of nonhumans which
act as parts of networks. Latour (1988a: 310) argues that “there are thousands of such
lieutenants (machines / nonhumans) to which we have delegated competences, it means that
what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by
nonhumans...studying social relations without nonhumans is impossible”.
There are many examples in ANT accounts of nonhumans, Scallops (Callon, 1986); Paris
Metro tunnels (Latour, 1988b), The Manhattan Bridge (Winner, 1991), Door Grooms
(Latour, 1988a), Hotel Keys (Latour, 1991), self coupling Carriages (Latour, 1996) and a
250 Ton Engine (Lindahl, 2005). Such entities are what Latour meant by the term ‘material
embodiment’. This durability or material embodiment may make it more difficult to reverse
a network. As such durability may provide stability and usually it provides order to a
network over time.
Ultimately ANT argues that actors are “a patterned network of heterogeneous relations, or
an effect produced by such a network (Law, 1992: 384)”. Nonhumans are more than mere
artefacts; they “do more than carry their own presence (think of a painting or a locked door).
In that their presence can re-mind people of their presences, artefacts come to stand for
specific others…thus rather than grant agency to artefacts…a wider conception of the social
world would help rethink traditional understandings of relations” (Munro, 2001: 481).
The symmetrical emphasis upon non-humans and humans is sometimes lost in actornetwork studies, which can be criticised for following the actor in practice and the actor
tends to turn out to be human and some sort of hero or even a manager, such as the
biologists in Callon’s study of St Brieuc Bay, who try to persuade fishermen to try scallopfarming; or Louis Pasteur in Latour’s study of the pasteurization of France; or the
management of EDF in Callon’s study of the promotion of the electric vehicle (Michael,
1996: 63). However, later studies within the ANT tradition have eschewed this world of
heroes and villains, coalitions and betrayals and instead have focused on “inherent
instability and incessant skirmishes” (Michael, 1996: 64). Michael suggests that ‘multiple
memberships and multiple marginalities need to be incorporated into ANT’ (1996: 65) by
citing Star (1991: 52):
People inhabit many different domains at once… and the negotiations of identities, within
and across groups, is an extraordinarily complex and delicate task. It’s important not to
presume either unity or single memberships, either in the mingling of humans and non-
humans or amongst humans. We are all marginal in some regard, as members of more than
one community of practice (social world).
This quote is particularly relevant to the study we present in the next section. But Michael
also points out that it is not just that we may be central at the office but marginal at the local
golf club, rather it is that we can be both core and marginal at one and the same place, we
can oscillate or vacillate, our positions can be inherently ambivalent. To illustrate this he
cites Singleton and Michael’s (1993) study of the Cervical Screening Programme within
which general practitioners (GPs) occupy an ambivalent role, both core and peripheral to
the programme.
In brief, Singleton (1993) describes how the British Government Cervical Screening
Programme was set up through a variety of official documents and institutional
arrangements, which presented a simplified view and role for general practitioners (GPs).
They were represented in three ways: (i) as ambassadors of medical science; (ii) as skilful
providers of the cervical smear test; and (iii) as publicists for the programme, persuading
women of the value of the smear test and the necessity to participate (Michael, 1996: 66). In
these capacities, GPs were enrolled into and translated by the Government Cervical
Screening Programme, but GPs also participated in other heterogeneous networks which
were not mentioned or represented by the Government Programme, but included other
human and non-human actants such as practice nurses, speculums, cervical secretions and
cellular fixatives. While trying to make the Government Programme work, GPs as of
necessity needed to problematize themselves and their relationships with heterogeneous
entities in order to renegotiate their identity in more complex ways, which take better
account of their interdependency with these other actants and their networks. In so doing,
GPs formulate their own GP-discourse which is more complex than the Government
Programme-discourse and at times at odds with it. Taking this further, Singleton and
Michael (1993) argue that GPs “construct their own GP Cervical Screening Programme
actor-network from within the governmental Cervical Screening Programme”, upon which it
is paradoxically dependent (Michael, 1996: 66-7). As Singleton (1993) puts this, the
Cervical Screening Programme has become “a benevolent adversary to the GP” (Michael,
1993: 67):
To overly stress uncertainty and multiplicity would be to endanger the governmental
Cervical Screening Programme and undermine the GP role; yet, to follow unflinchingly the
Government’s model of the GP role would be to render that role unworkable. (Ibid.).
The case we report below has many similarities with Singleton’s (1993) and Singleton and
Michael’ (1993) analysis of the actors and actants within the Cervical Screening
Programme; we place the HR practitioner in the role of the GP in relation to a top-down
initiative or policy programme. Vickers (2005) describes the role of the HR practitioner
enrolled by the top management of ‘Chemco’ (one of the largest international chemicals
companies in the world) in order to implement a Redundancy Programme. The Redundancy
Programme presented a simplified role for the HR practitioner as (i) an ambassador for UK
employment legislation and company ‘agreements’ on terms and conditions; (ii) as a skilful
handler of individual employment termination cases; and (iii) as a publicist and coordinator
of the Redundancy Programme. As we will see, this simplified top management
representation of the HR practitioner was in contrast with the HR-discourse developed by
the HR practitioner in relation to the heterogeneous actants he worked with but which were
not mentioned in the Top Management representation of his role: actants such as
employment law and national agreements, middle and senior managers, polymers and
production lines, union representative, the media and local politicians.
In the following section we report Vickers’ (2005) study of HR practices at a large British
chemical plant following its acquisition by ‘Chemco’. In the discussion that follows we
assess what we can draw from this single longitudinal ethnography for critical studies of
HRM.
4. Burnsland
One of the authors spent eighteen months working in industry as an HR manager during
which time he conducted research into management culture and practices, with the knowledge
of his colleagues. His company was a large UK-based chemicals company, called HCI, which
had been subject to a take-over bid some years before, during which the management had
pursued many defensive strategies including the provision of a contractual twelve month
notice period to the managers and professionals in the firm, as an expensive, disincentive to
potentially hostile take-over merchants.
The researcher was an HR manager in a business unit of HCI which subsequently became the
subject of later merger talks between HCI (the parent) and a large US based chemicals
company (Chemco). The chemicals industry is a highly concentrated industry with an
established oligopoly structure, dominated by US and European firms until the 1990s, when
Asian companies also rose to prominence. This led to a phase of restructuring, as different
established firms sought to specialize in those product areas where they could profit most,
rather than compete across a very wide product range. As a result HCI agreed to sell one
business unit to Chemco for one billion dollars, and our researcher was part of the
management team sold off in this way.
The business unit in question, Burnsland, had been in operation with HCI for fifty years and
was the largest employer in a local community in Scotland. A new site manager arrived from
the US, an old Chemco hand of thirty years experience. From now on the strategic debate
concerning Burnsland moved from the HCI offices in Britain to the Chemco offices in the US
and assorted European offices advising the Site Manager.
Chemco already owned a similar business unit in Luxembourg, producing similar products
but not in direct competition with the Burnsland product range. Chemco also acquired
another business unit from HCI based in Holland. A series of meetings were held with
representatives of all the sites across Europe and America to discuss the initial rationalisation
of production. A Production manager from Burnsland argued vehemently at these meetings
the site in Holland was using projected output figures whereas he was using actual output
figures and the site in Holland had never achieved such output levels in the past despite
having made similar promises.
After this series of meetings the new Site Manager at Burnsland called his first senior
managers meeting and began by announcing that the said Production manager would be
moved to an as yet unidentified role elsewhere following a short project role at Burnsland.
The first the Production manager knew of this was at the same time as all his peers during the
first senior managers meeting. This caused considerable anger amongst the management team.
The Production manager left Chemco within a few months having decided to find a job
elsewhere. Despite the Production managers’ earlier protestations Chemco senior
management in the US decided to accept the promises of the site in Holland and decided to
close three out of the nine production lines at Burnsland. At several subsequent meetings of
the senior managers at Burnsland the Site Manager requested that his team needed to be ‘good
foot soldiers’ and to ‘trust their leadership’. Open debate amongst the team was therefore
discouraged and Burnsland managers became guarded in their conversations at other sites or
company wide meetings. On one or two occasions the managers agreed that they would
deliberately remained silent. The new Site Manager asked the Operations Manager and the
HR manager to make a series of redundancies within a tight timetable, thus saving money,
and to prepare the lines for closure. The Site Manager reassured the Operations Manager, that
his own future was safe at Burnsland and the HR Manager was told by several senior
managers in Chemco that he would have a ‘promising future’ in HR with them.
The Operations manager and HR manager, called a meeting of all the middle managers,
representing every department in the unit and agreed they would hold weekly meetings to
progress the redundancies as swiftly as possible. This meeting became known as “the engine
room”, the place where the process of retrenchment was to be managed. The title was taken
from a previously successful redundancy exercise that had been conducted at Burnsland
several years earlier by HCI.
Neither the Operations manager nor the HR manager had any intention of closing the
production lines in line with Chemco strategic timescales and nor did the middle managers.
However, they were formally tasked with making redundancies as swiftly as possible and
officially that was what the engine room meetings were for. The Site manager had a standing
invitation to participate in the meetings, but generally did not, until he began to worry that the
promised redundancies were not happening fast enough.
The engine room managers were able to draw upon UK employment law (Transfer of
Undertaking Regulations – TUPE) and three documents (contract of employment, a
redundancy handling agreement, a grievance procedure) and to delay redundancies and line
closures. In turn this created more time for commercial managers to attempt to change line
closures, product transfers to Holland and to secure more investment in Burnsland.
TUPE provides legal protection to workers who transfer from one company to another by
ensuring that their contracts and al agreements and policies pertaining to those contracts are
transferred with them to the new employer. At Burnsland this meant that the 3 documents
were protected legally.
Within the contract of employment for managers and professionals was the right to a notice
period of a year. This immediately caused a problem for the planned speedy redundancy
process for part of the population. The redundancy handling agreement with the Unions
called for redundancies to be conducted on a voluntary basis and for all other alternatives to
be fully explored before compulsory redundancies were carried out. This agreement had been
twenty years previously to resolve a specific industrial relations issue and whilst the
agreement had been respected in HCI compulsory redundancies had been used by moving
quickly through the exploration of alternatives. The engine room managers chose to employ
the agreement to the letter rather than apply it flexibly as had been the case in HCI over the
years. The unions lodged a grievance under the grievance procedure which challenged the
basis on which the company had agreed to reduce capacity at Burnsland and not in Holland.
The Site manager said that he wanted to ensure that the grievance was settled on site and not
debated by his boss in America (the Production Director) as this would cause him
embarrassment. Under the terms of the procedure the first stage of the grievance had to be
heard by the Operations manager and the HR manager. The Site Manager could not attend as
he needed to be kept in reserve should the unions fail to agree at stage one. The unions had no
intention of failing to agree as this was a delaying tactic. The Unions agreed to keep the
grievance suspended whilst the company continued to use a voluntary redundancy process.
Having assured the Site Manager that in all honesty they would make the redundancies as
swiftly as possible, the Operations Manager and the HR Manager were able to use a voluntary
redundancy process in line with former HCI policies. The Site Manager ultimately believed
that the engine room was going as fast as possible under the terms and conditions and
agreements. In reality the engine room were able to use these documents as a smoke screen to
go even slower than was possible.
His process was in stark contrast to the Chemco way of redundancy, which the Site manager
was used to. Under American employment law, Chemco employees were issued with a notice
letter, usually giving them three months notice, and they were immediately notified of being
redundant. When the three months was complete, the employee left with redundancy pay,
which was less generous than the HCI terms and conditions.
At each engine room meeting a list of potential names was considered and sometimes added
to. The managers processed a few cases, where it was known that employees did in fact wish
to leave the company and they arranged substantial redundancy packages for them. In this
way they made a few voluntary redundancies as slowly as possible, while claiming they were
working as fast as possible.
When the Site manager attended the engine room meeting, the managers would present the
confirmed figures of staff who had agreed to leave, tell stories of great progress and make
positive projections on how many more staff would probably agree to volunteer. When the
Site manager was absent, the meeting examined all possible means of slowing the process
down. These meetings usually began with a discussion of how many staff were left to run the
3 production lines due for closure and how even volunteers could be delayed from leaving.
Back stage, the HR manager and the Operations manager continually explained to the Site
manager the intricacies of UK employment law, and HCI custom and practice and the need to
consult with UK unions and eventually the dangers that would befall if the local press became
involved and last but not least the local Member of Parliament (MP). Thus they carefully and
solicitously ‘kept him in the loop’.
At various stages over the eighteen months the Site Manager became nervous about whether it
was possible to achieve the redundancies by voluntary means. For example, he called an
impromptu meeting with the Operations Manager and the HR Manager, together with the
junior Production Manager for the affected production lines and the Finance Manager, all
regular members of the engine room. The engine room colleagues were already very well
aware of the Site Manager’s scepticism. The impromptu meeting indicated the Site Manager’s
intention to intervene directly in the process, because of his doubts about its likelihood of
success.
The Operations Manager said that the redundancy target of about 160 people was already half
met, because eighty had signed up already. The HR Manager added to the impression that the
redundancies were on schedule by adding that a further nine were to leave that very day by a
transfer of certain IT staff into a contractor service. However, the fact that such numbers had
signed up for voluntary redundancy did not mean they would in fact occur at all or happen on
schedule. By the end of the meeting the Site Manager said he felt reassured and could report
back to his seniors on the progress.
Two days later the European Commercial Director informed the HR Manager that despite of
the Site Manager’s claim to be reassured, he was still not reassured. The Site Manager had
phoned him “all in a panic and a state about not believing we could achieve the (redundancy)
numbers targets”. The engine room was swiftly informed that their ruse had not worked, and
fresh measures were needed.
At other points the Burnsland managers were put under pressure by their colleagues from
Luxembourg who claimed that the redundancy process could be carried out more quickly
whilst at the same time actively delaying its own processes. As an established Chemco site
their behaviour tended to be accepted and Burnsland’s stance as the newcomer criticised by
Directors. When the Burnsland managers openly challenged this behaviour they were
criticised or rebuked in private. For example the HR manager explained that redundancies
could not be achieved in less than 90 days due to UK legislation. After the meeting he was
told ‘off the record’ by a Commercial Manager that the Directors had said that he was
behaving in an ‘over emotional’ manner. This was followed up by the American HR Director
reminding the Burnsland HR manager of the ‘excellent career’ that was ahead of him. Before
meetings off site the Site Manager continually reminded his managers that they needed to be
‘good foot soldiers’ and to ‘trust their leadership’ to make the right decisions.
To counter these challenges the engine room managers privately mobilised the unions to
reopen their grievance and demand to speak to the senior directors who had made the decision
to close Burnsland production lines in favour of ‘promises’ from the site in Holland. Given
the reluctance of Chemco’s American managers to talk to trade unions the Commercial
Director agreed to meet with the Unions. The Commercial Director was a previous HCI
employee who wanted his products to be made at Burnsland. The Commercial Director and
the HR manager met the Unions during and adjournment of the grievance meeting. The
Commercial Director agreed to try to ensure that redundancies were voluntary. The
Commercial Director then telephoned the Managing Director in America to explain that the
Union issue was likely to delay the strategy and ask for her reassurance that the redundancies
would be on a voluntary basis. The Commercial Director then confirmed this with the Unions.
All later attempts by top level managers to speed up the process and pressurise the Site
manager to make compulsory redundancies could now be thwarted by the HR manager who
was able to remind them that this was not possible due to the Managing Director’s
commitment to a voluntary process.
The Site Manager attempted to use the performance related pay system and the career
potential rating system to rein his managers in. For example the Operations Manager and HR
Manager were both performance rated so that they would lose money from their salary.
However, the Operations Manager who had an input into the HR Managers’ rating was able to
ensure this did not happen. The HR Manager in conjunction with a European Commercial
Director was able to ensure that the Operations Manager was similarly protected. In the career
rating process the Operations Manager was rated as being at his career ceiling. This was
despite earlier ratings in HCI at a higher level. Similarly, the HR Manager was advised on two
separate occasions that he could have a good career. This inferred that to do so he had to toe
the Chemco line.
There was a full-time union official based in an office close to the site. This full-time official
was employed by the largest union represented at Burnsland. He was situated there by his
union, the only one of the three to have an office within a fifty mile radius of the plant,
precisely because the Burnsland site constituted a large proportion of his union’s membership.
If the members were redundant, then he could be also. Throughout the redundancy process the
HR Manager had several discussions with the local full-time official in private and sometimes
with the representatives of the other two unions, along with local union representatives from
the work force. Without being explicit, he shared with the union the fact and likely extent of
the redundancy programme. He also indicated that the engine room managers intended to
delay the final phase of redundancies for as long as possible in an attempt to gain more
investment and hence, greater security for the remaining lines at Burnsland.
The three unions then operated to an unofficial agreement that the union with most members
on the site would take the lead in discussions with the employer. The full-time official was
well respected by local councillors and by the local Member of Parliament and was a key
focal point at times of media interest in the plant. He was thus able to enrol the local political
community and media, whilst deliberately allowing himself to be enrolled by the engine room
managers. Their network of counter-enrolment now extended to six further existing networks
– the three unions, the local council, the local press and the Member of Parliament (MP). The
MP was a junior minister in the government and potentially could ask difficult questions and
stir up the press.
The full-time official briefed the press and the politicians on the size and scope of the possible
redundancies and was in turn informally briefed by the engine room managers. The local
journalist was reputed to be aggressive in pursuit of a story and had tended in the past to trade
in ‘shock horror’ headlines about industrial relations issues. In practice the engine room
managers and the full-time official agreed prior to talking with the journalist what each would
say, thus ensuring that the story given by the union official was supported by apparently
independent sources.
This whole process continued for over eighteen months eventually although many people
were made redundant, the delayed redundancy process allowed the production lines to stay
open long enough for further problems to ‘emerge’, which meant that product transfers to
Holland became the focus of the delay, rather than the process of redundancies at Burnsland.
For example one large customer agreed with a senior commercial manager that it would take
12 months to approve product from a different production line. Several other customers were
encouraged to express their concern that their products were to come from Holland given its
poor track record of delivery. The three Burnsland production lines remained open for many
months longer than the intended ‘strategic’ closure date. For example one line remained open
nine months longer than planned. Ultimately the commercial managers were able to persuade
Directors that more investment in, Burnsland’s remaining lines would enable some products
to be made in bigger quantities and they could not therefore be transferred to Holland as they
did not have the capacity. The former HCI business unit in Holland has subsequently been
completely closed down as Burnsland has managed to demonstrate greater profitability and
delivery.
5. Discussion
Watson (2004: 447) suggested that we need to move beyond the normative-critical or rhetoric
versus reality debates. He proposed that this should be done by exploring HRM in situ and
focussing on the three key areas of how policies come into being, how strategy is shaped in
practice and the politics between managers. We believe this approach enables us to focus on
the “complexities and dynamism of real organisations” (Legge, 1978: 16). We also believe
that our study replicates and indeed enhances the work of Dalton (1959a) in his study of
managers at ‘Milo’. Our study of Burnsland employed ANT in order that we made no a priori
assumptions about – power, whether or not a macro actor called ‘management’ existed, or
how HRM was used in the organisation. In short we used ANT as a vehicle by which to better
understand the complexities and dynamics associated with HRM in situ.
We believe that there are several areas where we see that an ANT perspective is able to
inform HR. First, the idea of enrolment, counter enrolment and re-enrolment enables us to
move beyond the usual managerialist approach to ‘commitment’ and overcoming ‘resistance’.
The unitarist approach to enrolment has generally been about commitment and discretionary
effort (or ‘surplus value’). Simply put, how do we get employees to buy into the
organisation’s vision? This is consistent with Purcell et al’s (2003) black box approach that is
supported by the CIPD. Typically, this is achieved through a carrot and stick approach. The
carrots usually involve the use of reward systems and career/succession systems. Rewards
such as the award of performance related pay and increments in salary or other perks (e.g.
company cars). Career and succession systems primarily use promotions but more subtly may
involve secondments, sabbaticals and promises through potential ratings of longer term
promotion. One of the key vehicles used in the process of this form of enrolment is appraisal.
Townley (1993) argued that such “tools [as appraisal are] aimed at effective attainment of
goals”. The whole process involves an offer of an identity (e.g. promotion to ‘senior’
manager) or an outcome (e.g. more pay) in return for commitment to (or is that compliance
with) the unitary cause. In change theory we are offered equations (e.g. Beckhard and Harris,
1977), curves (Adams et al, 1976) and step by step approaches (e.g. Kotter and Cohen, 2002).
We call this approach to commitment and change blunt enrolment. This blunt enrolment
seems to rely on using various strands of motivation theory to determine what recipe of
ingredients will result in motivated employees. But what is it that employees really want in
order to enrol as opposed to what do the organisation assume they want?
Once enrolled it is assumed that the process of enrolment or buy in is complete. However,
ANT shows us that whilst a network may be keen to make itself irreversible (e.g. Callon,
1986) this is only achieved if the enrolled actors wish to remain. Therefore the process of
enrolment is dynamic and there is a continual need to check that actors remain enrolled or to
work at re-enrolment. Once you have accepted career progression to a new job title you may
only be enrolled for a while before you start to question the network – what is it that the
senior managers can offer you next? In the Burnsland story HR systems are used as a blunt
enrolment process (e.g. careers, performance pay) and they are either bypassed or middle
managers find other ways to ensure they receive the awards and benefits of those systems.
Other HR systems (e.g. voluntary redundancy process, grievance procedure) are employed in
a more sophisticated and plural enrolment process. The Site Manager is enrolled and reenrolled by combinations of these HR systems and various human actors (e.g. managers, trade
unions).
Second, ANT is concerned with membership of multiple networks, negotiation of identities
and boundary spanning objects. The “extraordinarily complex and delicate task” of
negotiating identities described by Star (1991: 52) is clearly evident in our story of
Burnsland. The Site Manager is keen to maintain his identity and this is best achieved at
most points in the story through the engine room network which is dominated by his
subordinates. Yet the engine room is aiming to achieve a target that is not consistent with
the Site Manager’s role in the canonical network in which he is rewarded for achieving the
organisation’s strategy. This is a complex and contradictory position and at times is the
cause of the Site Manager questioning the engine room and threatening its irreversibility.
The Site Manager is a central part of Burnsland and yet marginal at Burnsland at the same
time. This builds on the work of Michael (1996) and Michael and Singleton (1993).
Similarly, the HR manager operates in several guises at the same time. He is the ‘HR
Manager’ entrusted by Chemco to manage and advise on employment matters and as such is
a member of the overt organisational network. He is the facilitator of the engine room and
custodian of policy transferred from HCI. He is also a participant observer conducting
research. Whilst this is a complex point to deal with, in practice it is possible to be both core
and marginal at one and the same place and time. It is not just the human actors that are in
this position. The idea of boundary spanning objects in ANT (Star and Griesemer, 1989)
suggests that nonhumans can be engaged in multiple networks and given different identities.
These objects may inhabit several networks and contribute to the transformation of the
objects themselves. The interpretation of these boundary spanning objects is at the centre of
many of the collisions between networks in the Burnsland story. One example of such objects
is the data sheets provided by the Burnsland Site and the site in Holland regarding their future
output capabilities. The same data is interpreted differently by the senior managers and the
Burnsland managers. Similarly, the grievance procedure is interpreted differently by the same
people depending on who they are interacting with. The procedure is used as a blocking
device by Burnsland managers to prevent senior managers from achieving their redundancy
plan. The senior managers allow the procedure to be interpreted in this way. The same
procedure is used as a positive vehicle by Burnsland managers for discussing with duplicitous
trade unions how the counter plan is being progressed.
Finally, ANT introduces the idea of nonhumans combined with the concepts of immutable
mobility and durability. In the ANT literature nonhumans take many forms from door grooms
(Latour, 1988a) and navigational instruments (Law, 1986) through to bridges (Winner, 1991)
and 250 tonne machines (Lindahl, 2005). What these nonhumans all have in common is that
they are enrolled into networks in attempts to achieve irreversibility through the concepts of
durability and mobility. Durability (sometimes called ‘material embodiment’) is when
materials or artefacts create a more stable network. Durability provides stability and usually
it provides order to a network over time. Mobility also provides stability to networks and it
usually provides order over space. Law (1986) describes such mobiles in his study of
transportable navigational aids used by Portuguese traders in the east. These mobiles could
be in a range of intermediary forms but will typically be robust and relatively easy to
transport - e.g. bills of credit, e-mails. Latour (1987) refers to such mobiles as “immutable
mobiles”. These mobiles enable certain actors “to centralise and monopolise” (Michael,
1996: 55) meanings. ANT does not accept that Actors and networks can own or possess
power. “Instead, power flows through networks, tries to sustain itself through durable and
mobile means but is ultimately ever changing” (Vickers, 2005: 138). In the Burnsland story
managers are able to draw on immutable mobiles and durables to build and sustain their
engine room network. Many of the key nonhumans in the Burnsland story are HR documents
(e.g. grievance procedure, redundancy handling agreement). These documents have
transferred over time within HCI and as such they are durable. In addition these documents
have transferred between HCI and Chemco and as such they are mobile. It is these documents
that appear to prevent the senior managers from acting and enable the continued operation of
the counter network established by the engine room managers. In most organisations these
documents are regarded as policy and procedure that guide employees and more junior
managers when more senior managers are not present. As such the documents are an attempt
to make the unitarist organisational network irreversible through their durability and mobility.
We call this inhuman resource management – leaving policy to do the managing and using
policy in the form of disciplinary procedures to control those people who choose to ignore or
disobey the instructions of these documents. However, these policies are open to
interpretation and the spaces this creates in the employment relationship are at best filled with
ambiguities. More junior managers can therefore choose to mis-interpret these policies as they
see fit. This new interpretation only lasts until the organisation issues further guidance and
revised policy. However, this can become a continual game of deliberate misinterpretation –
re-interpretation.
Dalton (1959a) whilst not concerned specifically with human resources offers a similar
reading to our paper. Dalton identified that cliques of managers lower down the organisation
were able to adapt the strategy of top managers and make it work in practice. These managers
were able to do this in a covert way in order that they could avoid reprisals from above. In the
Burnsland story the covert coalitions between managers at the site and their commercial
colleagues enable strategy to be adapted and in this case also circumvented. The fact that
investment monies were ultimately diverted to Burnsland is an almost irreversible testimony
to this circumvention. Whilst senior managers attempted to use HR policies and procedures
(e.g. career process, performance related pay) to punish dissention, managers were able to call
upon their coalition to provide protection from these reprisals. Dalton also described unlikely
coalitions between managers and unions. We have identified similar behaviour at Burnsland.
Although we do not see this alliance as an unusual occurrence in our experience of
organisations, it is rarely reported in managerialist literature. Perhaps the very idea of pluralist
relationships challenges the managerialist assumption of being logical, rational and ‘right’?
6. Conclusion
At the commencement of this study we made no presumptions as to what we would find in
relation to unitarism and managerialism. As such we employed ANT to give us a theoretical
perspective which would be open to the possibility that (a) such a unity existed or (b) did not
exist or (c) was being produced with some difficulty in the course of post-acquisition
management processes, or (d) was being dismantled in the course of the very same postacquisition processes. ANT is concerned with how macro-actors are socially constructed and
destroyed over time rather than presuming or even accepting that macro actors exist. By
employing the techniques of ANT we were able to go beyond the presumption of a unified
management. To explore the processes used to attempt to enrol managers into a unified whole
or attempts to subvert such manoeuvres. Our study enabled us to draw implications for the
kinds of critical study of HRM which we think are needed.
Our paper identified the blunt enrolments used by the organisation (e.g. career and reward
systems) and demonstrated how these enrolment could be maintained yet bypassed through a
more sophisticated process of counter enrolment. We also demonstrated how nonhumans play
a vital role in inhuman resources as durables and mobiles designed to manage the spaces and
ambiguities that exist in the employment relationship and in the absence of a managerial
presence to interpret them. Finally, we demonstrated the extraordinarily complex nature of
multiple memberships and identities that impinge on every day organisational life.
Through our examination of Burnsland we hope most of all to have demonstrated through our
use of Actor-Network Theory that Human Resource Management is complex and messy.
Whilst HR can indeed be employed as some kind of conformist tool for engaging the human
resource in a quest for efficiency maximisation, it does not have to be that way necessarily.
Deviant innovation is also an option for HR practitioners. HR may be able to set the agenda
and determine what the HR goals and priorities should be irrespective of management. Rather
than conform and attempt to justify their role as being to help management achieve its
efficiency agenda, deviance affords HR practitioners with an opportunity to move the
organisation towards a greater social and/or moral good. After all, the ambiguity and space
within the employment relationship create ample room for a multiplicity of mis-interpretations
of policy and procedure.
END NOTE: The authors would like to thank Elaine Swan from Lancaster University for her
suggestions regarding Vicky Singleton’s work.
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