POINTS OF VIEW
8022 - Theory 2 – Human Resources
When I started work, in the 1960s, the personnel department typically comprised a small group of people who handled the employment forms which had nowhere else to go. By the time I got to IBM, however, this group had become much more important, and featured significantly in management of the workforce -- though IBM was a unique at the time in doing this. By the 1990s it had blossomed into Human Resource Strategies (HRS).Unfortunately, through the 1990s, as the depression hit and Margaret Thatcher's competitive mindset took over, the workforce returned to the level of being units of labour.
Thus, for much of the last century, management has been obsessed with pushing around units of production on one hand and market shares on the other with, somewhere in between, units of labour. These are seen as being components of some sort of grand chess game. In particular, apart from the late 1980s and early 1990s, it has been seen that it is management versus the rest. This is particularly obvious when you look at the scurrilous levels of remuneration received by some top directors -- even where they have been notable for their failures. They are a different breed of animal, rather like a star footballer. You can't train them, you can only breed them. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of organisational dynamics.
Matters have been complicated by the role of the unions over the years. I will discuss here only the United Kingdom's unions. Much the same applies elsewhere at different periods. In that time the unions' relationship with management has, for far too long in the UK, been politicised -- though Tony Blair has desperately been trying to stop this, with some degree of success. By winning the miners' strike in the early 1970s the unions gained massive the power, when they still represented a large proportion of working population. As seems to be too often the case where individual groups gain disproportionate power, the unions then proceeded to use that power irresponsibly and ultimately disastrously. As a result Margaret Thatcher was able to successfully destroy the unions; so that by the 1990s the unions were pale shadow of what they had previously been. It is worth noting that Margaret Thatcher did exactly the same to almost every other powerful pressure group or potential pressure group which she came across. Thus the professions were as badly treated, especially the teaching and medical professions. The unfortunate result was that selfish anarchy now rules in most fields of human endeavour.
As I have said, in the late 1980s there was, for a short while, a focus on Human Resource Strategies (HRS) which recognised the importance of individual members of staff -- they no longer can be called workers since shopfloor workers no longer exist in most organisations. This HRS focus came largely from the Japanese organisations which had been so dynamic in 1980s, where such HRS policies were especially evident. The classic example was Toyota. I remember asking its CEO to what their success belonged and he replied by simply saying “Our relationship with our workers”, and it was true. One only has to go on its production lines to see workers operating almost as if taking part in an artform.
Through the 1990s we were predicting that the governance structures of organisations would be moving away from hierarchies, where messages passed down from the top, to collegial type operations, where peer to peer networking was most important. That seems to come grinding to a halt, as the topmost members of hierarchies have become almost besotted of the power they hold in the hirearchical structure, and are unwilling to even recognise that peer-to-peer relationships could be meaningful. The classic example of this is the Open University. When I joined it, and right up to when I left it, it was almost totally collegial. We were bound together in our peer group, usually agreeing not merely what we were going to do but who our various managers were to be. The classic part of this was the course team. Very much like cellular organic operations, it was so independent that, once approved, it was beyond the control of anyone in the University.
Now, the University is desperately trying to institute hierarchies, to break down the collegial power of its academics. This is nonsensical, for the very success University depends upon its collegial working. It is symptomatic of the problems caused by the half-baked application, of poorly understood business school concepts, to the naive organisation.
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