University of Manchester

Manchester Business School

MSC 2015
HRM Context and Organization
Lecture 1
Introduction
Miguel Martnez Lucio

Outline

Why management
Why context
Competing visions of management
Narratives of management
Realities of management
Context, roles and purpose

1) Why Management?
Management is an important feature of the economy and
society. The administration of resources, and the way
they are planned and developed, is an essential feature
of any modern economic and social order.
We assume we understand what the term management
usually means. It is seen as the management of things
the re-ordering of objects and resources. There are
those approaches that see management as the control of
these relationships.
A problem we have is the prevalence of myths of the
hero manager, i.e. the individual that acts alone or
independently. So we need to move beyond heroism and
an understanding of the reality of management

 Yet management is relational, it is in great part the outcome of

a collective effort. It follows that managers are part of an
overall process and context of control and sets of wider
relations. There is increasing emphasis placed on
understanding management in relation to the changing
organisational, cultural and environmental contexts of society.

Clegg et al (2005: 500) defines it as:

The process of communicating, co-ordinating, and
accomplishing action in the pursuit of organisational objectives
while managing relationships with stakeholders, technologies,
and other artefacts, both within as well between organisations
I would also add: and beyond the organisational as well.

2) Why Context?
Management does not exist in a cultural, organisational and
political vacuum.
Managers are not individuals that can act without reference to
external influences.
What is more management itself consists of a variety of cultures,
styles, structures, and processes. Management is politically and
culturally produced
Management is changing constantly and evolving: much is by
design and much is by default as well.
Hence we need to sensitise ourselves to how there may be
different perspectives regarding management and its roles and
purposes. We also need to understand:
- why management changes,
- what are the pressures on management,
- and what are the forces that shape new management techniques.

Week

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Theme for each session

Seminars

Introduction
Management as Context:
Competing narratives and legacies
Management function and
management development
The Context of Organizational SEMINARS
Structure
LECTURE 1

RELATED

T0

RELATED

TO

Training and the Context of SEMINARS

Changing Skills:
LECTURE 2
-Styles and Types of Human
Resource Management
-The Learning Organisations and
Knowledge Management in the
Context of HRM

RELATED

T0

The Changing Context of

Leadership and Communication

RELATED

TO

Session includes a short talk on

research methods and the study of
HRM in terms of context and
organization
The Ethical Context of Human SEMINARS
Resource
Management
and LECTURE 1
Corporate Social Responsibility
-Ethics and HRM
-Corporate Social Responsibility
and International Framework
Agreements

Week 4

SEMINARS
LECTURE 2

Week 6

Management Development and Change: SEMINARS

RELATED T0
Models, Narratives and New Demands
LECTURE 6

Week 7

The New Ethical Leadership

Week 8

Organizational
Culture
and
Diversity SEMINARS
RELATED T0
Management:
LECTURE 8
The Context of Diverse Organizational Cultures

Week 9

The Context of Change: Managing change and SEMINARS

RELATED
new HRM

SEMINARS
RELATED
TO
LECTURE 6

TO
LECTURE 8

Week 10

General Lecture and Discussion on the Future

Contexts of HRM

3) Competing Visions of
Management
A) Economistic readings
Marx and the view of competitive capitalism
Capital and Labour relations: antagonisms
Means: Managers are concerned with the
application of efficacious techniques in order to
realise certain ends.
Ends: exploitation and aim of profit
Managers as technicians but not neutral, allies of
employer classes, agents of capital deploying
objective means to achieve exploitation

b) Henri Fayols concept of

management

Management as

Specialisation of labour
Authority
Discipline
Unity of command
Unity of Direction
Subordination of individual interests
Centralisation
Order
Equity
Personal Tenure
Esprit de Corps

c) The Taylorist Contribution

Scientific Management

1st Principle
Was that management must gather all information on the performance of a given job and not
just leave it to labour to develop and store that knowledge through experience. This would
allow management to recognise the best way of doing the job in the same way labour were
able to and the learning of short cuts and tricks of the trade that labour had acquired and
used to their own advantage and furthermore allow management to develop new ways of
organising and performing work. This was known as the dissociation of the labour process
from the skills of the workers.
2nd Principle
Required all brainwork to be taken out of the shop-floor and located within a management
controlled planning function. Whilst decisions over the execution of work were controlled by
labour management would not be able to assert their will in achieving the extraction of the
desired amount of effort. To achieve this required that the unity of the labour process be
broken up - or the separation of conception from execution.
3rd Principle
Management must hold a monopoly over the knowledge that they have acquired of the
execution of work, and transmit it to workers only in the form of simplified job tasks to be
followed unthinkingly by the worker. Work must be planned in detail in terms of how to
perform it and how much to - and then given to the worker. This Braverman called the
monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labour process and its mode of
execution.

 Taylor understood and applied the principles of Babbage a classical

economist who posited that all work should be divided up into as small a
task as possible. This minute division of labour was adopted as part of
Taylors approach.
Upon these principles modern management of capitalist production rose
up. Braverman notes that the notion that control over the knowledge of
production that the scientific analysis of work could have been
performed and owned by the workers in production rather than
management - was a debate at the time of Taylors work, the fact that from
a modern perspective the ownership of knowledge by management and
not workers seems so natural is - for Braverman an indicator of how
influential Taylorist principle became in our understanding of the
appropriate social and technical organisation of work.
Note the Engineering background of early management thinkers and the
importance of occupational identity in framing management and industrial
knowledge

d) The Context of Fordism

- Taylorism forms the ideational foundation of Fordism

- The cult of the assembly line
- The Impact of American Manufacturing
- Fordism is also forged through the emergence of the
bureaucratic form
- Mass salaries & Mass Consumption: the emergence
of standardised markets and consumption patterns
- The Architecture of Mass Production and
Consumption: The Age of the Factory and the Mass
Supermarket

e) Towards the Social and Organisational Explanation some

origins
Mayo Managing Coalitions
Question of managements authority and undermining of legitimacy in
1930s due to failures and tensions in the Taylorist approach to
management.
Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne Studies

Work as group activity

Work is central life interest
Lack of attention to human relations was a major flaw in management
Work and group belonging and need for satisfaction
Complaints may be reflection of broader issues
Informal social groups have a major role on worker wellbeing
Management can foster collaboration
Workplace should be view as a social system made up of interdependent
parts

 The role of in-group solidarity: limiting work and engagement (rate-busting,

chisler, squealer, etc): how groups self police and deal with norm violator and
approximation to management
(Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939)
Informality and the role of relations in and around work
In the absence of any formal support for groups and social relations at work
they were seen to be a response to management by workers
Hence Human Relations is not solely a soft form of management but itself
has agendas and politics in addressing the need to manage groups
This tradition is tied to the age of the pschologist in management which
emegres alongside the previous engineering paradigm
So management debates in the USA in the early to mid 20th Century are
foundation stones as there are real differences and changes

Movements contributing to the development of modern

management (the case of HRM) in the USA

Civil Service Reform

Industrial Welfare work
Industrial safety movement
Progressive Social Reformers
Trade Unions
Government regulation and labour law
Scientific Management
Vocational Guidance
Industrial Psychology
Employment Management
World War 1
Industrial Democracy

(see Kaufman, 2008)

 The relevance is that we see different

views of management and different
approaches
They reflect the context of thinking, the
emergence of different schools of thought,
different academic traditions, different
sectoral interests and forms of production,
and the maturation of management

4. Narratives of Management
Simon Western (2008) Leadership Sage
He engages with the notion that
management and leadership have
different phases, forms and one can see
performance/Taylorist norms,
therapeutic/Human Relations norms, and
neo-liberal/messiah traditions within them
(the leadership lecture will pick up on this)

The History of Leadership

We can see three discourses of leadership in current
management practice which relate to historical understanding
of management

The Leader as Controller: links to Scientific Management

The Leader as Therapist: links to Human Relations Tradition
The Leader as Messiah: links to Organisational Change
paradigms we will come back to this in later lectures

Simon Western (2008) Leadership: A Critical Text London:

Sage
22

5) Management and the balance between

control and co-operation

Friedman (1977) alternatively posits the

notions of Direct Control and responsible
Autonomy as representing alternative
approaches adopted by management in
their assertion of control over the labour
process. Capitalism draws on both sides
of the debate.

 Direct Control represents a system which seeks to limit

the scope for variations in the amount of labour effort
through the assertion of tight supervision and coercive
management practices, and minimising the
responsibilities held by individual workers this would
seem to parallel aspects of Taylorism
Responsible Autonomy alternatively attempts to
harness the adaptability of labour power by giving
workers leeway and encouraging them to adapt to
changing situations in ways beneficial to the firm.

Tension between control and cooperation are inevitable.

The desire to produce versus the desire to
subcontract/put out;
The desire to directly control workers and
the desire of allowing for greater
autonomy.

The Two Faces of HRM

The discussion of HRM began to revolve around binaries and in some ways they reflect
the ongoing tension between forms of control and ways in which work is responded to.
In the 1980s, there was much talk of competing perspectives between the Harvard (Beer
et al, 1985) and the Michigan Schools (Fombrun, et al 1984).
The first was more concerned with the impact on HRM of internal and external
stakeholders, and saw HRM strategy as a pluralist negotiation between interests. Kochans
work continued this tradition by arguing that effective systems of HRM, in terms of the
quality of labour and efficiency, are the outcome of a supportive and interventionist
regulatory system combined with a dialogue between labour and management (Kochan
and Ostermann, 1994). The argument dovetails closely with the partnership tradition in
industrial relations (Ackers and Payne, 1998; see Martinez Lucio and Stuart, 2004 for a
discussion).
However, the Michigan school was less concerned with external political fit and more
concerned with cultural and strategic congruence between the different aspects of HRM
within a firm based on fitting strategy to cultural aspects and the economic objectives of
the firm.