Please circulate widely
Ethics and HRM: Theoretical and conceptual analyses
Special issue of Journal of Business Ethics
Full paper submission June 30, 2011 to be published in 2012/13
The very notion of human resource management – that humans should be
managed as resources – is ethically fraught. The management of humans as
a form of ‘resource’ risks the humanness, dignity, rights and liberty of
those managed. Also at risk are the virtue, autonomy and moral well
being of those managing, called as they are to instrumentally direct
people’s very humanity. Nevertheless such issues remain vastly under-
explored in the research literature despite the growth of human resource
management as a management practice and a scholarly field.
Human resource management can be studied at the micro, meso, and/or the
macro level. To date, however, studies investigating human resource
management from an ethical perspective have tended to focus on the micro
level concentrating on issues of risk and compliance, fairness and
equity, and employee rights. Less open to ethical scrutiny has been how
the growing power imbalance between employees and organisations, and the
diminution of influence by labour organizations, means that human
resource management exercises increasing control over workers’ lives.
With the subsequent dominant role of ‘strategic’ thinking in both
scholarly and practitioner discussions of human resource management,
such that performance is privileged over persons, the existing
concentration on this micro level seems difficult to justify.
We seek papers that provide ethical interrogations of the theory and
practice of HRM with specific attention to developing a theoretical base
on which HRM might be both critiqued and re-visioned. Contributions can
come from a variety of philosophical, political, ethical, critical,
sociological, and other theoretical perspectives. Papers may include,
but are not limited, to the following:
• the implicit ethics in the language and rhetoric of “Human
Resource Management”;
• ethics and HRM in its global, historic and politico-economic
context;
• the ethical implications of the shifts in institutional power to
the firm and the increasing political role of HR both inside and outside
the firm;
• the use and relevance of different ethical philosophies and
theories to the development or critique of HRM;
• ethics and subjectivity as it relates to the objectification of
humans as resources to be used strategically;
• the commodification of the worker inherent in buying and selling
of labour;
• the loss and/or appropriation of “the Other” in the utility of
humans as resources;
• ethical critiques of the corporate appropriation of people
through HRM practices such as employee engagement and employee
empowerment;
• the contribution of the field of industrial relations (IR) to
the ethics of people at work;
• the ethics of international HRM is a post-colonial world;
• the use and abuse of new technologies in employment
relationship;
• ethical implications of humans being constructed as global
resources;
• loss of our physical and sensory bodies through our creation as
objects of HRM;
• ethics and the gendered construction of people at work through
HRM;
• the role of watch dog institutions such as trade unions, NGOs,
auditors, in their capacity to protect vulnerable workers;
• the contribution of relational ethics, such as care ethics and
feminist ethics, to the (re)consideration of human “resources” as human
“relations”;
• the future for ethics and HRM if financial markets continue to
reward companies for inflicting human suffering;
• the perpetuation and normalization of HR discourse and ideology
through our own teaching, research and practice.
Journal of Business Ethics special issue to be published in 2012/3. To
be considered for a special issue on Ethics and HRM you must submit a
full paper by June 30, 2011 prepared in accordance with the guidelines
of the journal
<http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/applied+ethics/journal/10551>.
We strongly suggest you indicate your intention to submit, or send your
abstract, to Michelle Greenwood as early as possible, but not later than
February 28, 2011.
Guest editors for this special issue:
Michelle Greenwood, Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash
University,
michelle.greenwood@monash.edu;
Jan Schapper, Graduate School of Management, La Trobe University,
j.schapper@latrobe.edu.au; and
Gavin Jack, Graduate School of Management, La Trobe University,
g.jack@latrobe.edu.au.
All enquiries and submissions should be forwarded to Michelle Greenwood,
Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, Australia,
michelle.greenwood@monash.edu.
Kind regards,
Michelle Greenwood
--
Michelle Greenwood
Department of Management
Faculty of Business and Economics
Box 11e
Monash University
Victoria 3800
AUSTRALIA
61 3 9905 2362
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