Jerry Hallier

Employers' discovery of training: Self-development, employability and the rhetoric of partnership.

Explores recent expressions of support by employers for the importance of training in creating business success. Argues that this change in posture cannot be explained in terms of a growing recognition of the weaknesses of the labour force in intermediate‐level skills, because the new focus is on personal development, self‐management and “correct” attitudes rather than technical skills. Shows that while the changes in the valuation of training are consistent with Anglo‐Saxon notions of business management, they are more reflective of attempts to reshape the employer‐employee relationship. Observes that competitive pressures on organizations over the last 20 years have undermined traditional expectations of career opportunity and job security. This context has created the conditions under which this emphasis on normative training helps in the development of a new kind of psychological contract based on a rhetoric of partnership. Concludes that employers’ discovery of training is more about finding ways to secure employee commitment in uncertain times than about transforming skill levels.

Management enforced job change and employee perceptions of the psychological contract

Despite increasing research interest in the psychological contract, little is known about how employees’ contractual beliefs alter during major organizational changes. Using a sample of air traffic control workers who have been used to stable work roles over long periods, examines employees’ contractual responses to enforced job change. As job change approached, contractual acceptance or violation was engendered by sensemaking appraisals of management decisions, the meaning given to premove uncertainties, and perceptions of victimization. Following job change, sense‐making continued and eventually yielded either a calculative assessment of the employment relationship or feelings of sustained violation. While sustained violation was accompanied by visible expressions of resistance against management, such acts represented a desire to reinstate the established employment relationship. Conversely, workers who accommodated the personal outcomes of management breaches became less committed to a contractual relationship, and resolved to exploit management weaknesses and omissions. These divergencies reflected how the contractual meanings given to single breach events were kept separate from panoptic assessments of management’s entire body of behaviour during the reorganization.

Welcome to the House of Fun: Work Space and Social Identity

Following the diffusion of HRM as the dominant legitimating managerial ideology, some employers have started to see the built working environment as a component in managing organizational culture and employee commitment. A good example is where the work space is designed to support a range of officially encouraged ‘fun’ activities at work. Drawing on recent research literature and from media reports of contemporary developments, this article explores the consequences of such developments for employees’ social identity formation and maintenance, with a particular focus on the office and customer service centre. The analysis suggests that management’s attempts to determine what is deemed fun may not only be resented by workers because it intrudes on their existing private identities but also because it seeks to reshape their values and expression.

Greenfield recruitment and selection: Implications for the older worker

The recruitment of young, “green” workers has long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the greenfield site. Extends understanding of how person‐centred recruitment, with its emphasis on employee acceptability, disadvantages the older greenfield applicant. Whether it be a new high commitment or customer service site, worker age is shown to combine with the conventional recruitment criteria of skill, class and gender to constitute an excluded labour segment. In its superior capacity to shape workforce composition, greenfield person‐centred recruitment is shown to be important to understanding the ways in which managerial control is pursued and exercised more widely than within the labour process. Leopold and Hallier’s framework of greenfield types is also modified to encompass new customer service sites where acceptability recruitment is critical to greenfield employers’ labour relations strategies. Concludes that person‐centred recruitment should be studied as a critical feature of greenfield workplace politics and practices.

Creating and replicating HRM on greenfield sites: rhetoric or reality?

Greenfield sites have been seen as the most favourable setting for the adoption of human resource management (HRM). Presents a study of two greenfield employers’ attempts to introduce and maintain HRM philosophy and practices. Contrasts one management’s creation of HRM philosophy with another’s efforts to replicate its principles in a new unit. Describes and assesses these managements’ practices over the ten years since start up. Demonstrates that in the face of market pressures, greenfield managers are no more capable of maintaining soft‐version practices than their brownfield counterparts. Shows how these managers attempted to legitimize hard‐version practices by continuing to rely on language which reflected the humanistic principles of HRM. Concludes that without a radical reappraisal of management’s values, the long‐term aims of HRM will elude greenfield and brownfield sites alike.

Attempts to advance the role of training: process and context

While HRM has stimulated studies assessing the extent of UK training, there has been little sustained research into trainer roles and influence. Using semi‐structured interviews with trainers in public and private sector organizations, considers the assumptions and tactics that trainers use to enhance their influence. Shows that, at a rudimentary level of service, attendant approaches to build credibility with line management locks training into a subservient position. Likewise, while shared threats can close some of the status gap between training and line management, alliance tactics are insufficient to improve the general status of trainers. High status training is not achieved by a progressive passage through a common sequence of mobility stages. It develops from a supportive training culture where trainers develop new ways to assess their organizational contribution on conventional performance criteria and from charismatic trainers innovating training knowledge. Continually reinventing their contribution, however, means that high status remains conditional.

Managing employment on greenfield sites: attempts to replicate high commitment practices in the UK and New Zealand

Greenfield sites have been seen as the most favourable setting for the adoption of HRM-style high-commitment work practices. We present a comparative study of Scottish and New Zealand greenfield employers’ attempts to replicate a high-commitment philosophy. After outlining the proprietary recipes of the organisations, we analyse a number of factors that threatened or undermined the practice of the philosophy and show how managers continued to rely on the language of high-commitment by repackaging and re-presenting the same philosophy.

The decline of cooling out applicant failure: Some adaptations to organizational changes by self‐regulating groups

Goffman’s concept of cooling out the mark (Goffman, E., “On cooling the mark out: some aspects of adaptation and failure”, Psychiatry: Journal of the Study of Interpersonal Relations, Vol. 15 No. 4, 1952, pp. 451‐63) is proposed as helpful for understanding self‐regulating groups’ attempts to pacify transferring colleagues who are facing admission failures. A longitudinal study of an air traffic control company is used to examine what happens to the status and operation of a long‐standing group‐regulated cooling out process when the rejection of applicant colleagues suddenly increases following the onset of mass job moves. Groups saw the tradition of using cooling out to obscure trainee complaints about admission decisions as less important than publicising failure by pressing management to address their new staffing problems. The pressures surrounding the decline of cooling out were also found to weaken the common basis of these groups’ established occupational identity. Specialized occupational and group constructions emerged that linked identity and task on the basis of unit location, specialist operational skills, and even desirable age profiles. The conclusion drawn is that while the very act of turning away from the cooling out tradition may undermine the process of self‐regulation, it may, paradoxically, represent a necessary step in the transformation of the group from one type of self‐regulated identity to another.

HRM as a pluralistic forum: assumptions and prospects for developing a distinctive research capability

In this paper, the dilemmas facing HRM on how to establish itself as a distinct area and yet avoid a particular disciplinary allegiance and level of analysis are assessed. HRM is seen, like business strategy, as a meeting ground between established disciplines. HRM research to date is then assessed in this light and problems of the potential limitation ofcontributions of other relevant disciplines are assessed. The established findings in organizational development (OD) have, it is argued, been particularly neglected in HRM analyses of organization change. The importance of developing pluralistic HRM research is re-affirmed. HRM as a pluralistic forum

Other Voices, Other Rooms: Differentiating Social Identity Development in Organisational and Pro-Am Virtual Teams

This paper advocates a social identity approach as a way to overcome the normative limitations of existing virtual team identity research. We also explore how social identity understandings of virtual team identity could benefit from incorporating comparisons between organisational and professional amateur virtual teams; and a focus on technologically mediated dialogues.