Discussion: View Thread

Please circulate widely, apologies for cross postings.

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>.

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. 

To send a message to the list, send your email to SIM@aomlists.pace.edu

_______________________________________________________________________

Visit the SIM Division website at: http://sim.aomonline.org _______________________________________________________________________

If you wish to unsubscribe from this list or change your delivery options, you can do so online at: http://aomlists.pace.edu/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=sim&A=1 _______________________________________________________________________