ILPC 2027

In this paper we will provide a conceptual analysis of the connections between work and the political economy to argue that Human Resource Management (HRM) is remains an embedded ideological system of employment contestation. We argue that excessive marketization and hyper-individualisation constrain not only corporate long-term interests but also wider social values (McCann, 2013). In short, HRM is buttressed via a pro-market ideology which leads to worker and societal immiseration. We further argue that structures and processes of HRM play a reciprocal function in that many of its practices serve to both perpetuate and legitimate patterns of comparatively high social and economic inequality, especially links to debates about contemporary finacialisation (Cushen and Thompson, 2015).

We trace an ‘immiseration effect’ in a number of ways. First, by reviewing debates concerning shifts in social structures of accumulation, the contextual forces underpinning investor capitalism (e.g. financialisation) that can be seen to promote a culture of hyper-individualism and free-market ontological, normative and methodological assumptions surrounding work and employment regulation in contemporary society (Palpacuer et. al., 2011; Harley, 2015). Second, the ideological marketization of work and employment regimes is unpicked and critiqued by drawing on three contemporary managerial attempts at control and consent: through ‘high performance work systems’ (HPWS) policies; via the increase in especially ‘talent management’ strategies, and finally be examining changes in ‘wage and earning’ distributions. Finally, the argument is used to challenge the way much of the subject of employment and management is taught in mainstream university business schools. Our argument is that much of the marketization and financialisation of capitalism has become manifest in business school teachings and structures of learning, enhancing rather than questioning free market systems of regulation and accumulation (Khurana, 2007). While the arguments and sentiments will be familiar to most ILPC scholars, we advance those connections between the political economy of work, employment, managerial and corporate ideologies, and how the subject area is taught requires extended conversation and discussion. The responsibility of educators is to encourage a critique not only of the marketization of the field (and the practice of academic education), but the way it is typically taught and promoted among many universities. In this regard, there remains a major concern about the educational utility of labour process analysis and how work and employment debates within it inform particular modules of learning. From this the logic of educational immiseration is used to raise implications for the field of study, the way it is taught, and role of labour in education.

References

Cushen, J. and Thompson, P. (2016) ‘Financialization and value: why labour and the labour process still matter’, Work, Employment and Society, 30(2):352-365.

Harley, B. (2015) ‘The one best way? ‘Scientific’ research on HRM and the threat to critical scholarship’, Human Resource Management Journal, 25(4): 399-407.

Khurana, R. (2007) From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

McCann, L. (2013). International and comparative business: Foundations of political economies. Sage.

Palpacuer, F., Seignour, A., & Vercher, C. (2011). Financialization, globalization and the management of skilled employees: Towards a market-based HRM model in large corporations in France. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 49(3), 560-582.