Abstract
Irena Grugulis’ book, A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about human resource management, provides a special antidote to the conventional texts on Human Resources Management (HRM), particularly with its critical and sophisticated overview of the key realities and debates of HRM, and its conversational and humorous style. The book thus differs from traditional books of HRM in many important ways.
First, Grugulis does not claim to offer transformational practices that will better organisations as many others do; instead, her book explores the truth of what happens at work and highlights discrepancies between rhetoric and reality of HRM in workplace. Cooksey and Gates (1996) argue that HRM practices often bear utopian expectations. Richards (1993) cites Robert Chia’s comment that management education values ‘strong’ thinking-decisive, strategic and able to say ‘I know’ rather than ‘weak’ thinking which recognises uncertainty, differences and acknowledges limitations in its own knowledge. Contra the prevailing ‘strong’ thinking in many management books, this book has valued ‘weak’ thinking by recognising the differences and limitations of key employment and HRM practices. As Grugulis (2017) comments in the book,
it will not insult your intelligence by trying to convince you that any or all of all these are the solution to every organisational ill, nor these practices always work, no matter how unpropitious the conditions, or that they make workers happy. (p. 1)
While much discussion has focused on finding the reasons for those differences of HRM practices and why practices do not work, this book opens room for debates and critical reflection by recognising the boundaries and limitations of HRM practices. The book is argumentative and challenging in tone, but it has rightly pointed that organisations must take into account not just what textbooks say should happen but also what actually does happen in order to make HRM practices successful.
Second, Grugulis’ book treats workplaces as social sites for friendship and companionship, as well as for exploitation, discrimination and harassment, instead of focusing only on the positive aspects of HRM that typical HRM texts often do. This book recognises the conflicting nature of HRM and deals with the dark side of it without disguising those as aberrations that could be easily overcome. It regards the workplace as neither a utopia nor dystopia but presents it as scenarios where conflict and cooperation are likely to co-exist.
Moreover, Cooksey and Gates (1996) criticise that ‘written work regarding current HRM practices tends to be idealistic and over-simplistic, often with little or no empirical evidence supporting the broad generalisations of the concepts and processes advanced’ (p. 17). In this book, Grugulis has drawn on current research to provide comprehensive evidences, and vivid, meaningful examples to elaborate the key debates in the areas of HRM including HRM and strategy, skills and training, pay and reward, flexible work, employee voice, service work and the future of work. These examples offer an authentic portrayal of how different HRM initiatives are operationalised in real organisations. As such the book offers some stimulating discussions of HRM practices that encourage readers to reflect on the contradictions and challenges of HRM.
Grugulis’ book covers some of the most controversial topics in the area of HRM. After introducing the contested definition of HRM and the unitarist, pluralist and radical frames of reference that interpret work, Grugulis emphasises the potential gaps between rhetorics and realities of HRM and explains the causes of such gaps in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 explores whether HRM contributes to business strategy through the lens of ‘best practice’ and ‘best fit’. It questions the causal relationship between HRM and organisational performance by arguing that there are no accepted definitions of both HRM and performance. In contrast to the assumption of the positive impact of HRM on organisational performance, the evidence in this chapter suggests that profits often result in HRM rather than HRM results in profits. Skills and training is the centre of discussion in Chapter 3, which explores three main dimensions of skills in the workplace, namely, skill in person, skill in the job and skill in the social setting and further compares different types of training and different international systems of approaching vocational education and training. Grugulis points out that we need to be cautious with the fashionable comments from management gurus to predict the rise of knowledge economy. She argues that more than a minority of people would work in knowledge-intensive jobs, while many occupations are still routine and demand little of workers.
Chapter 4 examines the way that pay is delivered and determined and analyses challenges of different pay and reward schemes, particularly performance-related pay. It also critically discusses the polarisation of pay over the last few decades, with the examples of the absurdly high pay of executives and the National Minimum Wage for workers in low-skilled sectors. Grugulis also highlights the role of gender in influencing pay and reward. Chapter 5 considers the different kinds of flexibility, such as temporary employment, part-time work, agency work, zero hours contracts, contractors and freelancers, and the implications of each of these types of work for both employers and employees. The evidence shows that the increase in flexibility only benefits a small number of highly skilled professionals, and the majority of those employed on flexible contracts do not enjoy advantages. It also reveals the worrying fact that women and migrant workers are more likely to find themselves in precarious work.
Chapter 6 looks at various forms of employee voice and compare employee involvement and employee participation in terms of their depths and responsibilities. They have been explored as ways of empowering workers. The hidden agendas and totalitarian tendencies of these initiatives, however, are not ignored. Service work and emotional labour are the focus of the Chapter 7. The service sector is viewed as a ‘messy agglomeration’ which leads to the discussion of emotional labour. It focuses on the potential negative aspects of emotional labour and various coping strategies that labour can adopt to regain their control of emotions. The final chapter shifts our attention to how the future of work will look like. It recognises the conflicting nature of HRM and considers three key features of workplaces: skills working conditions and job security, by conjuring images of optimistic and pessimistic future scenarios.
The strength of this book – its concision, critical reflection with vivid examples and informal, humorous tone – makes it not only a valuable addition to the reading resource of both undergraduate and postgraduate management students, particularly those students with an HRM focus, but also good reading materials for people who are not on formal courses but are just interested in the way organisations operate. Its focus on the gap between rhetorics and realities of HRM can also help practitioners to learn how to make HRM initiatives more successful and effective in the organisational settings. One potential weakness of the book is that most examples and data are drawn from Western countries, the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, although there are some efforts of engaging with what happens at work in developing nations, such as China and India, in some chapters. This is not too surprising as most HRM models, rhetorics and practices are drawn from large organisations in Anglophone societies. Perhaps, more examples from developing and transitional countries would add a comparative dimension to understanding the complexities of HRM on a global scale.