Debates, both direct and indirect, concerning equality at work are currently framed by political tensions that are emerging across various countries. Equality initiatives led by management, unions or other workplace actors have been important in embedding equality and diversity practices within workplaces and are often a response to changing legislation such as the Equality Act 2010 in the UK, or the enforcement and advisory agencies of the state, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Various organisations, however, tend to forge ahead with such initiatives for altruistic or reputational reasons. Human Resource departments and managers are playing an increasingly central role compared to, for example, half a century ago, when the focus was on collective and individual negotiations on a narrower set of issues.
HRM departments have been viewed in various lights historically. Some critical views see them as an extension of management control and hierarchical processes, with limited autonomy and working according to the diktats of an organisation’s senior leadership. Furthermore, economic and political changes have weakened HRM’s scope as a meaningful actor for engaging with work (Thompson, 2011), and the financialisation of organisations has restricted HR’s ability to pursue social agendas (Rafferty and Dundon, 2018).
However, the relative autonomy of HRM departments depends to a considerable extent on circumstance and context, in particular the cultural and economic foundations of the employer. The organisational culture of a firm can often be identified through the extent to which it adheres to socially responsible approaches and tightly follows legislative requirements on matters such as redundancies or technological change. However, the growing impact of legislation on equality and related issues, such as health and safety, may critically position HRM departments as interpreters or filters – as it were – of new pressures and expectations. Key individuals within HRM and diversity-related departments become important stakeholders working alone or with others (such as trade unions, worker networks and external consultancies), acquiring deeper knowledge, experience and expertise, and interpreting and initiating change for the senior leadership and the organisation as whole in some cases. In traditional industrial relations contexts, personnel managers - as they were once known - were pivotal in engaging with trade union branches and negotiations, giving them a degree of autonomy and relative power within the organisational structure. Currently these departments play a filtering and expert role (albeit in different ways and with different agendas).
Critical attitudes, not only towards the equality agenda generally and its role in the workplace, but also towards the structures and roles of HR departments, have recently begun to emerge among some politicians and some sectors of the mass media. These departments are regarded in highly politicised terms as new bureaucratic behemoths and obsessive champions of the equality agenda either for their own ends or in pursuit of a new social agenda around diversity. Stigmatised, together with trade unions and other social organisations, as the supposed cause of low productivity, they now are seen as part of the state and its obsessive drive to regulate society and the economy, according to such narratives.
Yet such interventions often ignore the precise and elaborate strategies and discussions required by structural pressures and the sheer complexity of social change. Theoretical and organisational aspects of HRM, along with their discussions with workers and trade unions, play a role in fusing, or attempting to fuse, new worker rights issues with organisational and operational imperatives. Much depends on the nature of the department, its resourcing and its expertise. The changing political environment brings with it an increasingly critical stance towards inclusion and equality agendas generally, which the authors view as a negative development. The fact that the bureaucracy and management of equality is becoming the focus of political and media attention will have implications for how the enhancement of equality and fairness in the workplace plays out in the future. HRM has always been seen as ambiguous and variable, as academic studies have shown, but its recasting in this new light will have significant repercussions for how equality and fairness issues are portrayed, making it an important subject for study. Furthermore, with some key companies in the USA cancelling their diversity training and employment programmes this political pressure on UK HR departments will be worth observing as it will have implications on a range of developments and trends in equality at work.
References
Dundon, T., & Rafferty, A. (2018). The (potential) demise of HRM? Human Resource Management Journal, 28(3), 377391.
Thompson, P. (2011). The trouble with HRM. Human Resource Management Journal, 21(4), 355-367.