‘Human resource management and the worker’: employee voice in management

Rise of the worker in HRM

A grasp of Roethsliberger and Dickson’s book Management and the Worker, published in 1939, is essential to any attempt to retrace the story of how workers have been considered in HR. This seminal book presented and discussed a series of experiments conducted within small groups of workers at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago from 1927 until 1932. The ‘Hawthorne studies’, subsequently as much praised as criticised (Organ, 1986), paved the way for the introduction of a social science perspective into management. Roethsliberger and Dickson concluded their account of the Hawthorne studies by introducing a distinction between two functions of the firm: the ‘economic’ function, focused on ‘producing a product’, and assessed in terms of cost, profit and technical efficiency, and a second function consisting of ‘maintaining employee relations, employee good will, co-operation, etc. From this standpoint the functioning of the concern is frequently assessed in such terms as labor turnover, tenure of employment, sickness and accident rate, wages, employee attitudes, etc’ (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939: 397).

That episode marked the start, in human resource management, of an endless quest to find methods, techniques, systems and discourses that should be capable of combining the great expectation of productivity with the desirable outcome of worker satisfaction and well-being – or the desirable outcome of productivity with the great expectation of worker satisfaction. Such an ambitious mission has, since the Second World War, been entrusted to specialised ‘human resource management’ departments, in charge of recruitment, pay, evaluation and training, but also dismissal and the exercise of discipline, as well as, more broadly, encouraging workforce commitment and performance in a company or organisation.

In line with such a perspective, according to Hendry (2012), human resource management is related to the two different functions of economic output and worker cooperation. For him, HRM is represented in two principal schools of thought: one looks at corporate strategy and its implications for HRM; the other, influenced by the human relations school inherited from the Hawthorne experiences, ‘sees improved work relations and opportunities as a necessary condition for present-day organisations to be effective’ (Hendry, 2012: 19).

Such profoundly ambivalent – or even ‘schizophrenic’ – missions for HR management find a strong echo in the field’s popular works and in its numerous online avatars. As an example, ‘Let’s start with a brief definition’, the ‘AIHR Academy’ online wisely proposes: ‘Human Resource Management, or HRM, is the practice of managing people to achieve better performance. For example, if you hire people into a business, you are looking for people who fit the company culture as they will be happier, stay longer, and be more productive than people who won’t fit into the company culture. Another example is engagement. Engaged employees are more productive, deliver higher quality work and make customers happier. This means that if we can find ways to make employees more engaged, we help the company.’ ¹ In the same vein, many HRM textbooks promote a narrow vision of human beings as resources to be exploited more efficiently in order to maximise the firm’s economic performance, as shown by Taskin and Ndayambaje (2018) in their screening of nine best-selling HRM textbooks. In their phenomenological analysis, they explored how the HRM textbooks in most widespread use in the Anglophone and French-speaking areas (six textbooks in English and three in French) consider human beings. While phenomenologists have considered dozens of anthropological standpoints (political, relational and so on), one stood out here: workers are seen as mere resources or adjustment variables. In addition, they report that one human is not always equal to another (a manager may assess an employee’s performance, hire or fire them, and so on) and that most of these books share the same content, pointing to a lack of variety in the available theories and models. In other words, workers are not the focus of these textbooks.

Nearly one century after Roethsliberger and Dickson’s volume, what are the trends in human resource management today? What place does HRM give to worker voice?

Identifying three perspectives

Based on previous mappings of HRM (see Léonard, 2015; Léonard and Taskin, 2019; Taskin and Dietrich, 2024) and an additional integrated literature review, we propose three perspectives to distinguish the diverse approaches of this body of literature on workers: ‘managing without workers’, ‘managing workers with feelings’, and ‘managing with humans’.

First, part of the literature sees ‘human resources’ as a pure object of management, with practices that reduce the workforce to mere resources. This is ‘managing without workers’. Second, ‘managing workers with feelings’ could also be labelled ‘neo-human relations’, in which people’s emotions and feelings must be managed and find space for expression, but without any consideration for worker participation or collective voice. Third, ‘managing with humans’ sees ‘human resources’ as active players who have their own interests and a capacity to act individually and collectively in the company. This in turn requires managerial practices in which employees necessarily must have a say.

The three perspectives do not reflect a linear trend whereby recent conceptualisations or studies of management adopt the latest model and suppress older references. Rather the three perspectives coexist. Each constitutes an ideal-type and form, together, a frame of reference. Fox (1971) identified three ‘frames of reference’, which are distinct normative systems in which individuals and groups think and act in employment relations. The first is the unitarist ideal-type, in which the organisation is seen as ‘a team of people all pulling in the same direction, with connotations of a harmonious, energized, cooperative, high-performing organization united by common purpose, effective leadership, mutual gain, and team spirit, which thus yields healthy/productive industrial relations. People have different roles and positions, as in a football team or in a happy family, but the “one for all and all for one” spirit prevents performance-sapping frictions and conflicts’ (Kaufman et al., 2021: 212). The second is the pluralist ideal-type, in which employment relations exist between ‘occupational groups [that] are free to formulate and pursue their own normative aspirations’ (Fox, 1971: 153). Fox later introduced a third ideal-type, the radical framework in which two antagonistic classes confront one another: ‘The radical organization is a team of people divided into two antagonistic classes, a high-paid/work-little group of powerful management order givers and a low-paid/work-hard group of dependent employee order-obeyers’ (Kaufman et al., 2021: 212).

Our first two perspectives are clearly unitarist in Fox’s terms, because they consider employer and workers as having common interests, whereas our third perspective is close to Fox’s pluralist view. Nevertheless, our approach differs from the frames of reference defined by Fox.

First of all, the three ideal-types defined by Fox consist of paradigms, or ways of thinking, that shape actors’ behaviour in industrial relations at company, but also at sectoral and national level. What Fox seeks to explain is how these frames of reference influence the industrial relations climate and outcomes. His intention is to develop ‘an understanding of “the way people behave” by understanding the nature of the “total situation” within which their actions take place’ (Kaufman et al., 2021: 209). His ideal-types correspond to different ways of thinking about the relationships between occupational groups, and these different ways of thinking have an impact on actors’ behaviours and relations. By contrast, our three perspectives refer to ways of thinking about management, and only in the literature.

Finally, our approach focuses on managerial thinking, either promoted by the managerial literature or analysed by studies of current managerial practice and discourse. We do not look at responses and strategies developed by workers and their representatives. Similarly, we do not study the different dimensions of employment relations, as Fox does, but only the space left or given to employee voice. As such, our analysis takes place within the field of HRM.

This leads us to highlight the fact that Fox’s unitarist model of reference is still alive, albeit not in a homogenous form. It has found two different expressions. One takes the shape of neo-Taylorism, in the context of firms that have been financialised, networked and managed-by-processes. The other can be described as ‘neo-human relations’, with a focus on individual satisfaction and commitment. This is where we distinguish between ‘managing without workers’ and ‘managing workers with feelings’, a distinction made necessary by the fact that each is influenced by different schools of thought, and corresponds to distinct managerial practices. On the other hand, none of our three perspectives overlap with all or parts of Fox’s radical ideal-type because management theory is widely inspired by a definition of management as ‘the action, or activity, of running an organization, commanding it, planning its development and controlling it’ (Thuderoz, 2006: 14, our translation). This definition, given in Thuderoz’s book on a sociology of management, clearly underlines the fact that management, as a research and teaching field, as well as a set of practices, fully embodies and acknowledges the unequal roles found in employment relations in companies. Accordingly, focusing on employers’ pre-eminence leaves little or no space for an approach to class antagonisms.

Three perspectives in detail

The first perspective here is ‘managing without workers’. Human resources are seen as a pure object of management, while practices in companies tend to reduce the workforce to a mere resource. Cadin et al. (2012) call this perspective ‘instrumental’ because it tends to rationalise and even ‘objectify’ workers, considering them a mere factor of production, an instrument, like machines or production lines, which exist for the sake of the firm.

In this perspective, management focuses on tools it can use to measure, calculate, control and rationalise human resources. To some extent, in practice, managing human ‘capital’ necessarily entails a degree of objectivation of workers because employers must organise volumes and flux, such as the number of jobs and working hours, payroll and wage costs. HR management practices, however, may also tend to objectify all dimensions of workers when they focus mainly on rationalisation, procedures, control and measurements.

This strand of practice and study is influenced, implicitly or explicitly, by classical management theory as inherited from Frederick Winslow Taylor. In this framework human behaviour can and must be organised in terms of organisational structures, processes and work organisation. It also prevails in neo-Taylorist contexts such as call centres or logistics plants. As Friedberg (2011) summarises, ‘for classical organisational theory, human behaviour did not constitute a problem. [. . .] Improvements made in the relevant structures by systematic and rigorous application of a scientific approach to organisations would make these problems, and the behaviours that produced them, disappear. The behaviour of the worker conceived as homo oeconomicus thus became perfectly predictable, each agent being expected to respond in a stereotypical and quasi-mechanical way to changes in the physical conditions of his or her environment’ (Friedberg, 2011: 15, our translation).

In such a context, there is little room, from the management’s perspective, for employee voice, except in compulsory bodies and industrial relations procedures. Worker voice can then be heard either under the umbrella of legal constraints, or as the result of organised resistance by trade unions.

The second perspective, ‘managing human resources with feelings’, can also be labelled ‘neo-human relations’ (see above). It embraces the principles of the human relations school of thought, based on the conviction that the economic function goes hand in hand with the firm’s capacity to promote workers’ satisfaction. In this strand, much of the human resource literature focuses on the positive economic impact of workers’ satisfaction, commitment and well-being on the company’s efficiency. Accordingly, management focuses on practices that are supposed to contribute to worker satisfaction, motivation, engagement or even happiness, for the sake of company performance. Pursuing worker well-being, management also tries to meet fluctuating individual needs, such as the particular needs of so-called ‘millennials’ or of ‘generation Z’. As an archetypal example, an international network called ‘Happiness@work’ ‘aims to increase satisfaction and happiness in the workplace. It has been found that happy people are more successful, develop a strong sense of purpose and form authentic, cooperative connections with others.’ ²

The workforce in this context is thus seen as a collection of individuals with emotions, feelings and affects, which should be managed by the employer to promote the firm’s performance. Compared with the classical management school’s approach, ‘the “human relations” movement offers a richer vision of people at work: the individual here is not only driven by money, he or she is also motivated by more or less conscious affectivity and psychological needs. However, the movement remains captive to a Taylorist vision, based on a passive individual who responds in stereotyped ways to stimuli. The human relations movement only adds affective stimuli to economic ones’ (Friedberg, 2011: 16, our translation).

The underlying conception of humans is still unitarist, as Edwards (2003) notes. From a unitarist standpoint, employer and employees share similar interests, organise their relationships by means of individual contracts, and recognise managers as the most – or even the sole – legitimate players. Conflict is, in such a perspective, seen as pathological. Management’s role thus consists of avoiding dissatisfaction or, even better, of favouring satisfaction which, in turn, should avoid collective action. A recent focus on the psychological dimensions of the employment relationship influenced by positive psychology (Budd, 2020; Godard, 2014) brings to bear more ‘diluted’ notions of power and conflict, favouring a more consensual vocabulary referring to well-being, onboarding, engagement, collective intelligence and even happiness at work.

According to Sievers (1990), this perspective is also associated with an Anglophone perspective on management that promotes the individual and their personal success, rewards, choices, needs and character. In that register, work as collective and organisational action does not exist as such; rather, it is reduced to inter-individual relationships and personal bargaining between one person and the employer (psychological contract, leadership). Furthermore, in her critique of this type of thinking, Linhart (2015, also 2024) illustrates how the over-emphasis on the individual character of leaders – what she calls the ‘surhumanisation’ or ‘overhumanisation’ of management – contributes to an overall dehumanisation of work (see also her contribution in this issue, Linhart, 2024).

Although this perspective insists on the importance of humans, it still serves the same functionalist goal whereby workers are apprehended as resources for the firm’s economic performance, under the assumption that economic performance and worker satisfaction need to go hand in hand (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012). In this approach, workers tend to be seen as passive, and if their individual voice needs be heard to decipher their feelings, it is not meant to contradict management, and even less to participate in decision-making. Management remains the key actor who decides what is good for the company, as well as what is good for workers, and therefore negotiates with the employees.

Finally, a third perspective involves ‘managing with humans’. The important word here is ‘with’ because this third perspective does not consider ‘human resources’ to be mere objects of management. Rather, close to Fox’s pluralist paradigm, the approach sees ‘human resources’ as active players who have their own interests and a capacity to act in the company, also in the company’s interest.

Accordingly, management policies and practices not only have to cope with workers but must also establish processes that involve a variety of actors. Management also has to start to think critically about the ethical and moral assumptions and foundations of HR management, taking an ‘ethical-disciplinary’ perspective (Taskin, 2021). This implies that managers and worker representatives need to negotiate to find common ground.

The approach here is in line with what Friedberg (2011) calls the ‘nice picture’ proposed by Crozier (1964): ‘according to which individuals at work not only have a hand or a heart, they have, first and foremost, a head, a project, freedom. Instead of considering workers, more or less explicitly, as passive receptacles of social structures or victims of affectivity, the approach here is focused on the underlying rationality of observed human behaviors’ (Friedberg, 2011: 16, our translation).

In such a perspective, managerial debates focus on how to favour and organise worker participation, expression and autonomy. While some call for the creation and development of ‘liberated firms’ (for instance, Carney and Getz, 2009) and other forms of neo-participative management in which individuals are involved in decision-making (Robertson, 2016), others insist on workplace democracy, in which participation in decision-making – and sometimes ownership – is collective and representative in nature (Battilana et al., 2017; Ferreras et al., 2022). This perspective encompasses a wide range of alternatives in the governance of organisations and in human resource management, including an ethical shift towards anthropological considerations other than ‘resources’ (Hallée et al., 2018; Malo et al., 2019).

Among the alternative approaches to traditional HRM, sustainable HRM is one important and well-established stream (see, for instance, Ehnert et al., 2016; Kramar, 2022). This perspective integrates sustainability-related concerns in HRM practices. Within this field, ‘Common-Good HRM’, ‘Humanistic Management’ and ‘Humane Management’ promote ‘managing with humans’. These three approaches share an alternative anthropology to homo oeconomicus, involving reflexivity and justice, and a focus on the collective rather than the individual.

‘Common-Good HRM’ puts collective interests above individual interests. The logic is ‘external-internal’, in other words focused on the environment (Aust et al., 2020). This approach integrates the values of the common good into all HR activities (processes, policies, structure), leading HRM to develop a culture based on the values of the common good and to implement HR practices based on values such as dignity, solidarity and reciprocity (see Hoffman and Shipper, 2018; Hollensbe et al., 2014).

‘Humanistic Management’ proposes to broaden our consideration of the human person by going beyond the reductionism inherent in theories of motivation or capabilities, and attaching original importance to human dignity. Applied to HRM, this humanist ethos can be broken down into four major principles that characterise humanist management and its practices (Melé, 2009, 2016): first, a conception of the individual as a conscious and free being, endowed with intrinsic dignity; second, a holistic conception of society, built by singular individuals and interacting intermediary bodies that seek to ensure the common good; third, a concept of the company as a community; and fourth, a conception of business activity as a source of enrichment for society by providing goods and services in a fair and efficient manner, while respecting ecological imperatives.

‘Humane Management’ refers to a set of human and social activities (practices and discourse) and theories aimed at including men and women in an organisational project. The human being is considered to be a reflexive being who contributes to defining collective action standards against which his or her actions and those of a working community will be assessed. This perspective reflects a collective search for confidence in these standards, in others and in oneself. The object of Humane Management is work, and its purpose is recognition (Taskin and Dietrich, 2024).

Human resource management is thus seen as necessarily ‘political’, involving multiple actors and multiple stakeholders beyond managers (Cadin et al., 2012; Léonard and Taskin, 2019). Collective bargaining therefore appears to be one of various ways in which workers can express their interests, albeit not necessarily the only one, because various forms of participation can be put in place, such as direct participation, co-management, workplace assemblies and board-level representation (see De Spiegelaere et al., 2019).

Combined contemporary trends

The two first perspectives – managing without humans and managing human resources with feelings – may be considered mainstream approaches because they are the most popular nowadays (Malo et al., 2019). The third perspective – managing with humans – remains emergent, but this perspective benefits from renewed interest in the fields of management studies and business ethics (Hallée et al., 2018; Taskin, 2021).

Based on the various articles in this special issue of Transfer, we identify three trends that may explain the current limitations on worker voice in organisations: financialisation of the firm’s management and its consequent distance from operations and real work; management-by-process; and neo-human relations in HRM.

First, financialisation increases the distance between firm owners, managers and workers, resulting in decision-making at the top of the company in which workers’ interest is far from being a key criterion (see Gouzoulis et al., 2024). Those decisions can also be made far from where collective bargaining takes place, leaving little or no space for trade unions to discuss or negotiate (Appelbaum et al., 2013; De Spiegelaere and Vitols, 2024). In addition, when it is not the firm’s owners who define its orientation and goals but rather financial intermediaries, managers themselves cannot get a real mandate to implement coherent and long-term human resource policies. Therefore, not only workers, but also middle management lose power (Appelbaum et al., 2013; Gouzoulis et al., 2024). This is correlated with ‘distance’ in Riordan and Kowalski’s (2021) words: ‘Distance manifests in the growing divide between those who control the material and subjective conditions of work and those who labor. Its sources lie in today’s prevailing organizational practices, forms, and means of governing the employment relationship [. . .]. Together these affect the distribution and balance of power in the employment relationship and thus how conflict is both perceived and acted upon.’ According to them, distance is driven by financialisation: ‘the rise of financial capitalism in the 1980s led to the spread of business models and decision-making strategies that split apart firms’ management and ownership, promulgating the notion of firms as shareholder-maximizing institutions’ (Riordan and Kowalski, 2021: 588).

Second, procedures and processes used in managing large and complex companies also have an impact. Building on large sets of case studies and interviews conducted in France and the United States, Dupuy (2011, 2020) shows that, driven by increased competition, top managers tend to take control of the company via processes and reporting in modes of management that increase control, but also resistance on the shopfloor. He argues that today’s companies have lost the necessary trust and simplicity that workers need to be efficient.

Management-by-process, within the framework of which objectives, tightly defined processes and control methods are defined in offices far from day-to-day tasks, not only affects workers’ roles, but also that of managers themselves. Thompson (2011) uses the notion of ‘disconnected capitalism’ to reflect the disconnection among managers: local unit or functional managers must meet performance objectives with their teams, but are unable to do so because there is a lack of continuity in employment relationships, whereas top managers – who Thompson calls ‘corporate agents’ – are driven by financial practices linked to the establishment of parameters. There are, then, among management itself, competing or even conflicting objectives; what is rational from a financial point of view is not rational at all from a human resource point of view. Klinksiek addresses these managerial contradictions (Klinksiek, 2024), in the specific case of diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

Thirdly, the growing importance of management-by-process goes hand in hand with the rise of neo-human relations thinking in human resource management: in the context of work organisation led by a variety of procedures and controlled processes, the role of HRM is reduced to supporting individual employees, with a view to promoting their well-being at work (see Linhart, 2024). But while individual employees are able to express their feelings, they cannot participate in decision-making or act collectively. This is why we call this third trend ‘neo-human relations in HR management’. While well-being and social cohesion have been heralded as the number one concern of HR departments – which have become specialised through the fragmentation of their activities (Caldwell, 2003) – practices such as distributed workplaces, teleworking or distance management produce social isolation and worker ‘invisibilization’ (Gomez, 2019; Hertz, 2021). Between distant owners, on the one hand, and a fragmented workforce on the other, HR managers tend to respond with a focus on individual employees, seen as workers with feelings, but not as actors with interests. Neo-human relations HRM then refers to this focus on ‘people seen as key assets’, where ‘[l]abour may be an asset with value, but talk of “people are our most important asset” nowadays is likely to bring merely hollow laughter’ (Thompson, 2011: 363).

Combined, these trends reinforce instrumental practices and do not allow the renewal of HRM practices and models in the short term, while weakening workers’ voice.

Back to managing without workers?

De Spiegelaere and Vitols (2024), clearly show that the degree and forms of worker participation not only vary from one country to another because of national institutional characteristics – such as the system of collective bargaining – but also because firms use different types of governance. Their study demonstrates how company-level mechanisms give or leave more or less room for worker participation. Financialisation, with the pressure that it puts on wages, fosters managerial practices that reduce worker voice: there is no room here to consider employees’ interests, especially in the area of wages (see Gouzoulis et al., 2024). Similarly, network organisations that lead to fragmented workforce organisation provide a context in which employees, de facto, cannot organise their collective voice (see Helfen et al., 2024). ‘Distance alters actors’ interdependence and their perceived and actual power in addressing conflict’ (Riordan and Kowalski, 2021: 580).

Looking at how teaching and research in the field of human resource management have evolved over recent decades, Godard (2014) observes that the field, initially multidisciplinary and closely related to industrial relations, has become more and more influenced by industrial and organisational psychology. In his view this has four major implications for teaching and, ultimately, the practice of management:

First, the general orientation underlying it is not just unitary, but also potentially totalitarian and repressive [. . .]. The intended consequence is to ensure more obeisant and ‘motivated’ employees [. . .]. Second [. . .], the growing psychologisation of employment relations means that there is less and less possibility for actually understanding these relations. The problems of motivation and control, and the dysfunctions to which they may give rise, tend to be attributed to individual or interpersonal phenomena that can be avoided through careful selection and training/socialisation procedures if not more directly through ‘performance management’. [. . .] Third, [. . .], I-O psychologists are often ill-prepared and unwilling to teach or research in areas that require any knowledge of law, economics or institutions. [. . .] Fourth [. . .], there is virtually no space for analysing or even incorporating trade unions and collective bargaining – or for that matter any form of collective representation – within a psychologised HRM. Although it is possible to conceive of interest conflicts, these conflicts are individualised, attributable to individual self-seeking and assumed to be solved by aligning individual goals with those of the organisation through various incentive schemes. (Godard, 2014: 7–8)

Budd (2020) argues that Godard’s pessimistic view might nevertheless still be too optimistic because, under the influence of the discipline of organisational behaviour, there ‘is a shift away from seeking to understand formal organisational policies like selection and compensation systems toward an emphasis on analysing interpersonal and leadership dynamics, accompanied by similar changes in curriculum away from HRM to leadership and OB [organizational behaviour]’ (Budd, 2020: 74).

Psychologisation reduces organisational processes to individual phenomena and ultimately removes responsibility from the organisation. Where the causes of burnout are to be found in workload, career management policy or work organisation, this psychologising perspective puts more emphasis on individual prevention and support, overlooking organisational and collective levers. By doing so, it puts a lot of emphasis on individual emotions and is not conducive to the development of voice in a collective and representative perspective. Therefore the movement to a conception of workers as a collection of individuals who are personalities to be managed, and with no apprehension of power relations in the firm, leads to management practices that ‘foster a passive workforce’ and, in parallel with teaching and research, to a limited extent to conceptualise the collective and active dimensions of employment relations.

In such a context, human resource management itself, charged with managing a diverse and dispersed workforce, is understood to be inefficient, because it is unable to take employees’ interests into account and to conciliate the diverse interests in the organisation. As a consequence, the ‘human resource function’ loses credibility and legitimacy (Thompson, 2011).

In sum, there is a structural incapacity in financialised and networked companies, but also in parts of teaching and research in human resource management influenced by positive psychology, to take workers’ interests into consideration and, even more, to include employee voice in decision-making.

New opportunities for workers’ voice

The rather gloomy picture that we paint needs to be nuanced. While the discipline of HRM and its practices can, through the process of psychologisation described above and discussed by Linhart (2024), combine overhumanisation and dehumanisation, the process of financialisation analysed by Gouzoulis et al. (2024) means that new opportunities are emerging that are worth exploring.

First, a ‘neo-managerial set of representations’ has recently developed that promotes non-hierarchical and decentralised organisations, in which top management coordinates the firm by means of inspirational visions rather than procedures and control (Jégou, 2023). Such a perspective is present particularly in the discourse on the ‘freed company’ promoted by Carney and Getz (2009). According to Getz (2016), a major movement to liberate companies and public administrations emerged in France and Belgium. However, as Dortier (2016) wisely notes, managerial discourse on the ‘freed company’ is paradoxical because all the books and documentaries that promote it leave no place for workers’ opinion. In addition, Jégou (2023) shows that, even if one can observe participatory practices in some companies, they do not suffice to democratise the workplace, because workers are not provided with the capabilities they need for effective participation. But, he adds, this is a first step towards democratisation.

Second, still in the field of management, and more precisely in HRM, Taskin and Dietrich (2024) propose a ‘humane management’, or a humanist conception of HRM, centred on real work and recognition, in which workers are regarded as reflexive human beings. The perspective seems promising in its capacity to promote workers’ voice, which is the concrete application of reflexive anthropology. As already mentioned, other promising but less structured initiatives and communities have emerged, such as Common-Good HRM (Aust et al., 2020) or Humanistic Management (Melé, 2016). While this provides theoretical roots for such alternative ways of managing organisations and people, these perspectives are still in their early stages of development in practice, and there is little sign of them materialising.

Third, outside the field of management, Ferreras et al. (2022), in their manifesto, call for more democracy at work: power must be shared more equitably with employees, especially those who have historically been in a subordinate position, such as women and racial communities. This requires more democratic decision-making bodies within firms to rebalance power between shareholders and employees. Ferreras (2023) goes further by proposing the bicameral firm, which would include two chambers governing the company. Current boards of directors would be replaced by a ‘capital investors’ chamber of representatives’, along with a ‘labour investors’ chamber of representatives’. Top management, seen as the executive branch of the firm’s government, would be appointed by the two chambers together. Ferreras herself defines her proposition as a ‘real utopia’, but she argues for its implementation in firms across the globe. According to Malleson (2023), the project of the bicameral firm is a stimulating perspective that helps us to imagine a more democratic future. Having said that, the current balance of social forces makes us pessimistic about its real-life prospects.

In sum, while the current context does not seem favourable to the development of workers’ voice in HRM practices, there are other trends that tend to combine and constitute promising opportunities for the development of such practices.