University of Manchester Manchester Business School

MSC 2015 HRM Context and Organization

Lecture 1 Introduction

Miguel Martínez 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 Theme for each session Seminars

    

Week 1         

IntroductionManagement as Context: Competing narratives and legacies Management function and management development

   

Week 2         

The Context of Organizational Structure

Session includes a short talk on research methods and the study of HRM in terms of context and organization

SEMINARS RELATED T0 LECTURE 1

Week 3         

The Ethical Context of Human Resource Management and Corporate Social Responsibility

-Ethics and HRM

-Corporate Social Responsibility and International Framework Agreements

SEMINARS RELATED TO LECTURE 1

Week 4         

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

SEMINARS RELATED T0 LECTURE 2

         

Week 5         

The Changing Context of Leadership and Communication

SEMINARS RELATED TO LECTURE 2

Week 6          Management Development and Change: Models, Narratives and New Demands

SEMINARS RELATED T0 LECTURE 6

Week 7          The New Ethical Leadership SEMINARS RELATED TO LECTURE 6

Week 8         Organizational Culture and Diversity Management:

The Context of Diverse Organizational Cultures

SEMINARS RELATED T0 LECTURE 8

Week 9 The Context of Change: Managing change and ‘new HRM’

SEMINARS RELATED 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 Fayol’s concept of management

Henri Fayol’s concept of management

‘ All activities to which industrial undertakings give rise can be divided into the following six groups:1.Technical activities (production, manufacture, adaptation);2.Commercial activities (buying, selling, exchange);3.Financial activities (search for and optimum use of capital);4.Security activities (protection of property and persons);5.Accounting activities (stocktaking, balance sheet, costs, statistics);6.Managerial activities (planning, organising, command, co-ordination, control).

To manage is to forecast and plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control. To foresee and provide means examining the future and drawing up the plan of action. To organise means building up the dual structure, material and human, of the undertaking. To command means maintaining activity among the personnel. To co-ordinate means binding together, unifying and harmonising all activity and efforts. To control means seeing that everything occurs in conformity with established rule and expressed command.

Management, thus understood, is neither an exclusive privilege nor a particular responsibility of the head or senior members of the business; it is an activity spread, like all other activities, between head and members of the body corporate. The managerial function is quite distinct from the other five essential functions.’

Source: H. Fayol, (1949), General and I ndustrial Management, trans. Constance Storrs, London, Pitman

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 PrincipleWas 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 PrincipleRequired 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 PrincipleManagement 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 Taylor’s 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 Taylor’s 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 management’s 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

22

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

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 co-operation 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 HRMThe 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. Kochan’s 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.