The value of including employees:
a pluralist perspective on
sustainable HRM
Harry J. Van Buren III
Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance a conceptualization of sustainable HRM that builds on
scholarship focusing on the pluralistic nature of human resource management. The paper seeks to advance the
promise of sustainable HRM as an alternative to HRM scholarship that adopts a unitarist frame of reference.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a variety of HRM-related literatures to offer new
insights about what a pluralist perspective on sustainable HRM from the perspective of employees would look
like and what it would accomplish, and in so doing allow sustainable HRM to become socially sustainable.
Findings – Taking a pluralistic perspective is essential for making the concept of sustainable HRM more
distinct and robust. Sustainable HRM can offer a challenge to the dominant unitarist perspective on the
employment relationship, focusing the attention of researchers on the extent to which employment practices
benefit both employers and employees while contributing to social sustainability outside of the employment
context.
Originality/value – This paper adds analyses of pluralism and unitarism to the current literature on
sustainable HRM while also focusing attention on how sustainable HRM might be more robustly
conceptualized and also more normative in its orientation.
Keywords Sustainable HRM, Unitarism, Pluralism, Power
Paper type Viewpoint
Introduction
Human resource management (HRM) has both organizational and ethical implications. The
ways in which employment relationships are structured and managed affect the likelihood
that an organization will achieve its goals, as argued by scholars working within HRM
literatures such as strategic HRM theory (Boxall, 1996; Huselid et al., 1997; Lengnick-Hall
et al., 2009; Wright et al., 2005) and high-performance work systems (Appelbaum et al., 2000;
Ramsey et al., 2000; Shin and Konrad, 2017). Indeed, analyses of how the employment
relationship should be managed for organizational benefit have been expressed as long as
there has been management theory, starting with frameworks such as scientific management
(Taylor, 1911) and continuing to the present. Given that organizations can only create value
with and through employees, it is manifest that HRM scholars—as well as other management
scholars working in areas such as strategic management and organizational behavior—
would seek to connect HRM policies and practices to various organizational-level outcomes
such as profitability.
Here it is important to discuss the historical turn toward SHRM and its etiology. As a
variety of industries faced increasingly globalized competition (Sparrow and Marchington,
1998; Wright et al., 2005), pressures on organizations increased and new approaches to
management became necessary (Johnson, 2009). Businesses needed to change the ways in
which they procured and deployed labor, whether directly in their own operations or through
supply chain management (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2013). As a result, businesses recognized that
employees and human capital (1) were essential organizational assets and (2) their
management was an important source of sustained competitive advantage (Barney and
Wright, 1998). SHRM theory and practice therefore became more prominent as a response to
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 15 January 2019
Revised 21 August 2019
26 December 2019
3 April 2020
15 June 2020
Accepted 24 June 2020
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 44 No. 3, 2022
pp. 686-701
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-01-2019-0041
shifts in the external environment as well as increasing sophistication in management theory
and business practice.
Work in sustainable HRM has taken the analysis of how HRM is linked to organizationaland societal-level outcomes in a different direction from strategic HRM. Ehnert et al. (2016,
p. 90) offer this definition of sustainable HRM: “[s]ustainable HRM can be defined as the
adoption of HRM strategies and practices that enable the achievement of financial, social and
ecological goals, with an impact inside and outside of the organisation and over a long-term
time horizon while controlling for unintended side effects and negative feedback.” This
definition draws on the key insight from prior work in sustainability: the need for a long-term
perspective on economic activity that ensures the present does not harm the future. In this
respect, sustainable HRM sits alongside frameworks such as socially responsible HRM (Shen
and Zhu, 2011), which can be understood as terms of CSR-related policies and practices that
address the welfare and concerns of employees (Newman et al., 2016). What makes
sustainable HRM distinct in this stream of socially and ethically oriented HRM scholarship is
its explicit connections to sustainability as well as the inclusion of outcomes beyond the
employer-employee relationship. The intuitive insight of sustainable HRM is obvious: the
ways in which people and employment relationships are managed can have positive and
negative effects on various conceptualizations of sustainability, whether economic,
environmental or social.
Parallel to work in these domains of HRM scholarship, there have been persistent
debates about the positive and negative effects of various employment practices on
employees. While scientific management, for example, was an advance in management
theory from the ad hoc theorizing that had been emblematic of previous management
discourse, it was incredibly controversial in the early 20th century (Tikhomirov, 2017) due
to concerns that employees in workplaces influenced by it were being both dehumanized
and overworked by managers without receiving either remuneration consistent with their
enhanced productivity (Hill and Van Buren, 2018; Paxton, 2011) or basic respect for their
humanity. Later work in areas such as human relations and human resources sought to
correct the perceived excesses of scientific management (Van Buren, 2008) by adding
greater concern for the welfare of employees.
But concerns about whether contemporary employment practices truly work to the
benefit of employees have found expression even within strategic HRM scholarship; as
Lengnick-Hall et al. (2009, pp. 76–77, emphasis added) put it, “[v]irtually all SHRM research
takes the managerial/organizational perspective with an emphasis on the consequences for
organizational performance. Few, if any, question the impact of SHRM on individuals.” In a
similar vein, Kramar (2014, p. 1,073) notes that
The SHRM approach, however, is fraught with difficulties, including failing to take into account a
variety of stakeholder requirements, the reality of HRM inconsistencies within organisations, the
ambiguities, paradoxes and dilemmas of HRM practice and inadequate account of external
influences. In the main, the SHRM literature fails to adequately address the influence of different
stakeholder perceptions and national contexts. The short- and long-term financial outcomes are
given precedence and reflect shareholder interests.
Put succinctly, the problem with SHRM is that in overvaluing organizational goals, it harms
employees and their interests, diminishes the HRM function (Kochan, 2004) and in the long
run often (and in an ironic and self-defeating way) works to the detriment of organizations
themselves. As a result, a presumption that strategic HRM is at odds with sustainable HRM
seems entirely reasonable.
There are also persistent concerns about whether HRM professionals can or even should
play the role of employee champions (Harris, 2007; Thompson, 2011). The employment
relationship is central to ethical analyses of organizations (Francis and Keeg an, 2006;
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Greenwood, 2002; Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017). An over-emphasis on the strategic role
of HRM has led many HRM professionals to diminish the potential role of internal employee
champions as well as potentially harmful to their organizational legitimacy (Sheehan et al.,
2014). As a result, many human resource managers are less capable of addressing the ethical
issues endemic to their organizations’ employment relationships than they would be if they
better balanced the roles of strategic partner and employee advocate. While HRM can play an
essential role in promoting responsible behavior by organizations (Jamali et al., 2015), it often
has failed to do so. More generally, HRM as a function and as a profession is facing a crisis of
trust and legitimacy (Kochan, 2004; Paauweand Boselie, 2005) as employee cynicism about
HRM has become stronger (Brown et al., 2017; Kochan, 2004) due to a perceived shift in the
terms of exchange in the employment relationship in favor of employers.
The broader point is that HRM by its very nature addresses inexorable and deep ethical
questions, whether or not they are explicitly considered in HRM scholarship or practice. Here
I define “ethical” in terms of normative ethics, which encompasses analyses of what ought to
be in the employment relationship. Ethical analyses of employment seek to interrogate
employment practices in order to ask questions related to fairness, respect for rights and
procedural and distributive justice. Ethical analyses of employment relationships therefore
seek to inform changes in employment practices through regulation and/or through
voluntary actions undertaken by organizations. By extension, there is also no such thing as
HRM for which ethical analysis is inapplicable or ethical implications are absent. Employees
are the one essential stakeholder group upon which the organization depends and without
which it is unable to engage in any sort of collective action (Greenwood, 2002). Work in the
emerging field of sustainable HRM is—and should be to an even greater extent—focused on
asking challenging questions about whether HRM policies and practices work to the benefit
of employees as well as employers, as well as whether other social and environmental goals
are being promoted through HRM.
For HRM to be truly sustainable, however, it needs in particular to grapple with the
challenges that pluralism in the employment relationship poses, the problem of power
imbalances, and the necessity of including employee perspectives on sustainability. The
research question I am taking up in the paper is this: how can sustainable HRM better
integrate ethical concerns about employee treatment and in so doing ameliorate some of the
problems associated with imbalances of power within the employment relationship? As will
be discussed in a subsequent section, sustainable HRM scholarship takes in a variety of
approaches and foci. Kramar (2014) notes that sustainability itself is fraught with semantic
difficulties, making its integration with HRM even more challenging. I will not be addressing
issues related to environmental sustainability and its relationship to HRM in this paper.
Rather, I wish to reorient the conversation about sustainable HRM toward greater
consideration of employee-related outcomes. In this respect, the perspective I am taking is
explicitly normative rather than theory building or oriented toward empirical analysis.
Because questions related to the employment relationship are inherently ethical—
whether or not the ethicality of HRM is recognized in research or practice—sustainable HRM
scholarship can and should create space for ethical analyses as a way of understanding how
sustainability and HRM should be brought together. After providing a brief overview of the
sustainable HRM literature and discussing the key distinctions between unitarism and
pluralism in the field of HRM, this paper will take up the problem of power and sustainable
HRM within a pluralist frame of reference, and conclude with implications for future research.
This paper attempts to answer the call of Westerman et al. (2020, p. 1) to move beyond “[t]he
one dimensional single shareholder purpose of HRM,” which “must be supplemented or
replaced with strategic and operational people-management practices that take the
development of social, environmental, and human capital into account.”
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Sustainable HRM
Sustainability is a concept that dates back to the work of the World Commission on
Environment and Development, which defined sustainable development as “development
that meets the need for the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 43). More broadly outside of the developmental
economics context, sustainability can be defined in terms of actions by various actors—
including governments and firms—that seek to ensure “the preservation, regeneration, and
development of the ecological, economic, and social resources of a system” (Senna and Shani,
2009, p. 84; see also Ehnert et al., 2016). Sustainable HRM, as Kramar (2014) notes, is a growing
area of research within the wider HRM literature (see, among others, App et al., 2012; De Prins
et al., 2014; Diaz-Carrion et al., 2018; Ehnert, 2006 and 2009; Lopez-Cabrales and ValleCabrera, 2019; Mariappanadar, 2012a and b; Mariappanadar and Kramar, 2014). LopezCabrales and Valle-Cabrera (2019, p. 5) posit that “one reason why the corporate sustainable
strategies do not produce the desired effects is because these strategies do not integrate HRM
into their strategic planning and implementation processes.”
Sustainable HRM potentially offers a corrective to strategic HRM scholarship that
implicitly or explicitly privileges organizational outcomes over employee outcomes; not in
ways that necessarily privilege employee outcomes over employer outcomes, but rather to
find space for the explicit consideration of employee outcomes. By extension, the construct of
sustainable HRM further allows for the explicit recognition of legitimate outcomes vis-
a-vis
HRM beyond organizational benefit while also recognizing that HRM can have a dark side
that under some circumstances harms rather than benefits employees (Kramar, 2014).
As well-discussed in previous scholarship, there are myriad theoretical framings and
conceptualizations of sustainable HRM. While this is a possible strength in an emerging area
of research, it is also a potential weakness. Here Kramar (2014, p. 2070) is instructive: “There
are considerable semantic difficulties associated with the definitions of [the] terms
sustainability, SHRM and HRM. There are no definitive definitions and their meanings
vary according to the factors that frame their consideration.” Given that the semantic
difficulties for these concepts exist in isolation, it follows that their combination with other
concepts would compound those difficulties. Kramar (2014, p. 1,075) further notes that
sustainable HRM “has been used to refer to social and human outcomes which contribute to
the continuation of the organisation in the long term, that is to a sustainable organisation. It
has also been used to refer to HRM activities which enhance positive environmental outcomes
[such as] Green HRM(GHRM), and positive social and human outcomes for their own sake,
rather than just as mediating factors between financial outcomes and strategy.”
All of these conceptualizations of sustainable HRM are illustrative of one or more
conceptualizations of sustainability, whether in the traditional environmental sense or in the
sense of economic or social sustainability. Further, because sustainability does have multiple
definitions and conceptualizations, it follows that all of these steams of research capture
something important about the relationship between sustainability—however defined—and
HRM. However, the downside of such conceptual diversity is a lack of conceptual clarity and
therefore easily understood application to organizational practice, at least without careful
delineation of what is meant by “sustainability” in the context of HRM.
Here Kramar (2014) usefully differentiates among three main streams of sustainable HRM
research: capability reproduction, promoting social and environmental health and
connections. Capability reproduction is best understood as an extension of strategic HRM
research, seeking to bring together beneficial outcomes for both employers and employees.
While focused on economic outcomes from the perspective of the organization, research
taking this perspective posits that in the long term, sustainability for the organization can
also be achieved through generating positive outcomes for employees (see Ehnert, 2009). In
this line of analysis, only through consideration of employee outcomes can organizations
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maintain the kinds of human capital that bring about long-term, sustainable competitive
advantage. It is less than manifest, however, whether employees themselves are part of the
conversation about which human capabilities are to be developed and for what purpose.
Promoting social and environmental health approaches to sustainable HRM “refer to HRM
practices which contribute to both positive ecological/environmental and human/social
outcomes, with the intended purpose of achieving economic results” (Kramar, 2014, p. 1,078).
In this line of analysis, investments in sustainability have positive effects on organizational
competitiveness through influencing stakeholder perceptions of responsible business
behavior. There is a longstanding line of research (see, e.g., Orlitzky et al., 2003; Walsh
et al., 2003; but also see Zhao and Murrell, 2017 for a conflicting point of view on this point)
suggesting a positive link between social/environmental and financial performance—which
can be extended to investments in sustainable HRM. Similar to capability reproduction,
however, employees are largely absent from conversations about which elements of social
and environmental health are to be included.
Finally, connections-oriented sustainable HRM research “group examines the
interrelationships between management practices, including HRM and organisational
outcomes. These outcomes include environmental, social and financial outcomes. Implicit in
these writings is a moral concern with organisations behaving responsibly” (Kramar, 2014, p.
1,078). This stream of sustainable HRM research looks much like research in the areas of
corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance (for a review, see Wood,
2010). It arguably finds a stronger place for sustainability in HRM practice as intrinsically
valuable beyond its effects on organizational performance than do the other two streams
previously discussed. However, even here, organizational concerns are paramount relative to
concerns about employee welfare (Kramar, 2014).
These three streams of sustainable HRM literature make important contributions to the
literature. There are other, more recent, conceptualizations of sustainable HRM that are more
explicitly focused on creating benefits outside of the organization, such as Aust, Matthews,
and Muller-Camen’s (2019) conceptualization of Common Good HRM, which seeks to move
beyond narrow conceptualizations of corporate sustainability to take in business
contributions to sustainable development goals. However, they each have a major blind
spot: a lack of inclusion of the employee perspective. In capability reproduction, promoting
social and environmental health, and connection—the three main streams of literature within
sustainable HRM—it is the organization and HRM managers that are the primary drivers of
defining and implementing it, with less attention given to employee perspectives and
definitions thereof.
Where does this leave the literature on sustainable HRM? It is clear that it is gaining
traction as a subfield within the broader HRM literature. Sustainability is largely seen as
complementary to organizational goals and interests, although the intrinsic value of nonorganizational goals varies from scholar to scholar and research stream to research stream. It
is also clear that the prevailing definitions of sustainability within HRM, its
operationalization and its implementation are largely driven by managerial decisions and
discretion rather than engagement with employees as partners in the conversation about
what sustainable HRM is and what goals it should seek to achieve. Employees, I suggest, are
largely missing from the discourse about sustainable HRM. Table 1 outlines each of these
three areas of sustainable HRM research with regard to their inclusion of employees as
stakeholders and employee perspectives.
While there is no one definition of sustainable HRM common to the entire literature,
scholarship in the area generally posits that HRM practices should seek to promote some sort
of economic, social and environmental sustainability while also helping the firm to become
more profitable and competitive. Missing, however, from much of the extant sustainable
HRM literature are the perspectives and concerns of employees, as well as an analysis of what
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it would be mean for employees to benefit from sustainable HRM and for employee welfare to
be included as an outcome germane to sustainability. In this respect, sustainable HRM suffers
from some of the deficits of mainstream HRM research conducted from a unitarist
perspective, a topic to which I now turn.
Unitarism and pluralism
Unitarism and pluralism represent alternate positions on the relationship between employers’
and employees’ interests as well as on the role that managers and employees should play in
structuring and governing the employment relationship, which in turn has implications for
HRM. Unitarism is (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017, p. 663; see also Fox, 1966; Geare et al.,
2006; Guest, 1999; Kamoche, 2001) “the view of the organisation as a unitary structure
characterised by harmony and trust where emphasis is placed on common objectives and
values said to unite all participants in a common enterprise.” Unitarism further suggests that
employers and employees share common interests that do not conflict but rather converge,
meaning that there is no inevitable conflict between employers and employees. In contrast,
pluralism “sees the organisation as comprising different groups with both common and
divergent aims and objectives” (Geare et al., 2014, p. 2,277). A pluralist analysis of HRM takes
differences in interests between employers and employees seriously; while hostility and
antagonism between these two groups are not inevitable, there is a persistent need for
employees in any organization to exercise voice in order to defend their interests precisely
because there are inevitable conflicts between them and their employers. Pluralism in this
Research stream Inclusion of employees as stakeholders Inclusion of employee perspectives
Capability
reproduction
Employees matter because human and
social outcomes experienced by them
affect the organization’s long-term
competitiveness
Minimal: the organization largely
determines which capabilities are to be
reproduced and for what purpose, the
latter being largely focused on long-term
business survival
Promoting social and
environmental health
As noted by Kramar (2014, p. 1,078),
“[p]erforming well on social/human and
environmental indicators represents a
form of strategic investment and is a
means of satisfying a variety of
stakeholder expectations,” of which
employees are one of many
Minimal: while employee perspectives on
social and environmental health matter,
there is little discussion of how their
perspectives are integrated into this
conceptualization of sustainable HRM
Connections Employees are a greater focus in terms
of both involvement in sustainable
HRM practice and a focus of it in terms
of outcomes
Higher than either capability
reproduction or promoting social and
environmental health; connectionsoriented sustainable HRM anticipates
“HRM practices which build the
capabilities of the workforce, provide for
participative decision-making, diversity
management, high levels of workplace
health and safety and performance
indicators that reflect ethical concerns
(Kramar, 2014, p. 1,079)”, although there
is less attention given to the mechanisms
of employee participation than is
warranted
Table 1.
Sustainable HRM
research with regard to
the inclusion of
employees as
stakeholders and
employee perspectives
on sustainability
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respect is the counter frame to mainstream HRM scholarship that assumes a unitarist frame
of reference (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017).
Unitarism is implicit in “mainstream” HRM research (Geare et al., 2014; Greenwood and
Van Buren, 2017; Van Buren et al., 2011), so much so that it is not named as such. The appeal
of unitarism to HRM professionals and scholars is obvious. If unitarism is true, then what is
good for an organization and its owners is also good for employees. By extension, HRM
professionals working for that organization would not face role conflict between the demands
of strategic HRM and their role as employee champions. However, extant literature in this
area indeed suggests that role conflicts as experienced by senior HR managers are largely
resolved in favor of employers and a strategic HRM perspective (Sheehan et al., 2014).
Similarly, HRM researchers find personal utility in taking a unitarist stance for similar
reasons, although Nienhueser (2011, p. 390) notes that “empirical research [in HRM] is
reproducing an existing unitaristic idea[ology]. . . empirical research produces or enforces the
kind of image that best reflects employer interests.”
The distinction between sharing genuinely shared interests and employees being
expected to share their employers’ interests is fundamental to ethical analyses of the
employment relationship. If employers and employees together co-create and co-determine a
set of interests that are genuinely shared—while also recognizing that the inevitable
differences between the two parties to the employment relationship always remain as
challenges to be managed rather than overcome in favor of the employer—HRM is far less
likely to be exploitative than if employee interests are viewed by organizational managers as
obstacles to be overcome in favor of employer interests. Whether those interests are solely
pecuniary or whether they include some conceptualization of sustainability, the key issue is
whether the pluralism endemic to all employment relations is recognized or not.
Unitarism suggests that the exercise of employee voice is not only unneeded but also
counterproductive for both parties to the employment relationship. If employers and
employees share the same interests, then by extension managers and HRM personnel are
constantly acting in the interests of employees whether or not they mean to as they promote
the interests and goals of the organization—making the independent exercise of individual or
collective voice by employees to protect their interests unnecessary and indeed a distraction
from the task of management. Further, unitarism both buttresses managerial authority to set
the terms of exchange in the employment relationship and organizational autonomy to do so
free from governmental interference (Geare et al., 2014; Van Buren, 2008). A pluralist analysis
of employee voice, in contrast, takes a different position: voice is not only necessary for
employees to defend their legitimate interests, but also necessary for any employment
relationship to be fair to employees precisely because employer and employee interests
diverge at least in part, even as they may also converge in part (Van Buren et al., 2011).
In their article about ideology in HRM scholarship, Greenwood and Van Buren (2017,
following Habermas, 1998) distinguish among three types of validity claims vis-
a-vis unitarism.
Descriptive unitarist claims seek to advance the propositions that (1) the interests of employers
and employees are aligned or able to be so as well as (2) particular and extant HRM practices
actually do serve to align these two sets of interests. However, the problem with descriptive
unitarist claims is that they cannot be neatly separated from normative claims. Put another
way, HRM scholarship—and especially research implicitly assuming unitarism is descriptively
true, “is often presented as an objective truth claim without regard to the normative
assumptions embedded in it” (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017, p. 671). HRM scholarship that
seeks to be descriptive and facially neutral with regard to values, therefore, cannot avoid being
enmeshed in the messy world of what ought to be true in social relationships such as
employment. Here it is also important to note that there is little evidence that unitarism is
descriptively true as a matter of empirical analysis (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2009), in large part
because of a relative lack of empirical research on employee-level outcomes within the HRM
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literature. Further, it is suggested that employees are not a uniform stakeholder group with
regard to analyses of whether unitarism is descriptively true; for some employees whose skills
are perceived to be rare and valuable, it might be truer than for others, but for employees who
lack power or voice (a point to which I will return) it is far less likely to be so.
Normative unitarist claims in and of themselves are more straightforward: they posit that
in a philosophical sense employers and employees ought to have the same interests as a
matter of what is right and good. Here Greenwood and Van Buren (2017) make an important
distinction between two competing ways of thinking about shared interests: employers and
employees jointly determining what interests are truly shared versus employees being
expected to share and adopt the interests of their employers as their own, which can be
termed as employees being expected to share their employers’ interests. The former way of
thinking about shared interests suggests a high degree of codetermination and collaboration,
with give and take necessary for employers and employees to come to a place where they
have jointly defined shared interests in a way that is satisfactory to them both. The latter,
however, is emblematic of coercion and “is far more accurate with regard to how the notion of
‘shared interests’ is actually meant and used in mainstream HRM research and practice than
the first” (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017, p. 671). It is one thing to suggest that employers
and employees ought to share interests through careful normative argumentation and a
robust analysis of how such genuinely shared interests might come to be operationalized, and
quite another for employers to use their coercive power over employees to enforce a
conceptualization of shared interests that does not represent employees’ true preferences.
Finally, instrumental claims about unitarism seek to elucidate what could be and in so
doing “develop frameworks that connect HRM practices to the alignment of employee and
employer goals” (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017, p. 672). The corollary claim is that wellinformed and -executed management practice in the employment arena makes such
alignment possible, with the embedded normative claim (again) that employer and employee
interests should be aligned. In much the same way that descriptive unitarist claims fail to be
supported empirically—because of a paucity of employee-level research vis-
a-vis employees’
goals and interests as well as inadequate theorizing of how HRM practices are linked to both
employer and employee outcomes—instrumental claims also fail.
Interestingly, unitarism might itself become a way for HRM practitioners to shield
themselves from having to consider the possibility that conflicting interests within the
employment relationship might require careful ethical analysis and perhaps the adoption of
policies explicitly designed to benefit employees. In this respect, unitarism can be a
self-serving ideology; HRM managers holding to that position (Geare et al., 2014) achieve the
best of all results for themselves: they can believe that their own actions work to the benefit of
their organizations and to employees while also crediting themselves with a nuanced and
enlightened view of the employment relationship, with its associated pitfalls and ethical
dilemmas for employees, that through their enlightened perspective have been able to avoid
bad outcomes for employees while also achieving benefits for their organizations.
Here it is important to return to the concept of sustainable HRM in the context of unitarist
and pluralist analyses of the employment relationship. If unitarism is true in any sense, then
the notion of “sustainable HRM” from the perspective of employees and their interests is
superfluous: employment relationships that maximize employer/owner benefit are by
definition both sustainable (in a social sense) and good for employees. Thus, by extension, all
HRM would be sustainable in a unitarist world. If pluralism is true, however, the challenge of
making HRM truly sustainable is much harder—requiring careful analysis of how HRM
might serve the genuine interests of employers and employees. This is not to say, of course,
that sustainable HRM is necessarily unitarist in its orientation, or that it inherits all of the
problems and blind spots that strategic HRM has. Rather, I am making a simpler and more
direct claim: sustainable HRM has the promise of being a more humane, employee-focused
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model of HRM as it simultaneously advances the environmental and social goals of
organizations. However, for sustainable HRM to realize this promise and to advance
organizational sustainability in all of its dimensions, employee perspectives and participation
are essential.
Power and sustainable HRM in a pluralist frame of reference
Power is central to the analysis of any relationship between an organization and a
stakeholder group (Mitchell et al., 1997; Van Buren, 2001) and particularly so in the
employment relationship (Greenwood, 2013; Kaufman, 2015). Stakeholders that possess some
sort of relevant power are able to withhold consent from the terms of exchange with an
organization and thus negotiate for better treatment from it (Van Buren, 2001). If unitarism is
true, then imbalances in power between employers and employees really do not matter: any
organization and its managers will simply do what is sensible for both and managers will act
in ways that are consistent with good stewardship for employees as well as for the
organization.
However, if pluralism is a truer depiction of the employment relationship—as this paper
suggests is the case—then analyses of power matter considerably in defining sustainable
HRM in both theory and practice. Put another way, HRM cannot be truly sustainable if (1)
employee perspectives are not included and (2) employers use imbalances of power in ways
that harm employees. Employees who lack power will find themselves to be vulnerable to
mistreatment by employers precisely because harming them can make employers better off.
Here the concept of frames of reference is useful. A frame of reference (Greenwood and Van
Buren, 2017; Snow and Benford, 1988) is both a claim about what is ideal (thus functioning at
the level of ideology) and an epistemological claim about how knowledge is produced in
support of the ideal. Fox (1966) was the first to identify unitarism as the dominant frame of
reference within HRM scholarship. Frames of reference are particularly powerful and highly
durable because they function as taken-for-granted beliefs about what is and what should be.
They are all the more powerful because they function best when they are subconscious: not
being aware that one’s work is influenced by a frame of reference makes it highly unlikely
that one’s basic assumptions in that work will be analyzed and questioned. Contemporary
HRM research has largely adopted unitarism as the dominant frame of reference for the
employment relationship.
For sustainable HRM to make a significant contribution to scholarship in HRM, it needs to
take in analyses of unitarism, pluralism and power. It needs to offer an accurate depiction of
how relationships between employers and employees actually unfold in order to address
structural imbalances between them. As a normative claim, I posit that frameworks for
sustainable HRM should seek to address employee rights and dignity in order to promote
social justice and employee welfare, even as organizational managers (rightly) seek to
promote goals and interests relevant to organizations. In a very real sense, sustainable HRM
scholarship and practice should seek to advance consideration of questions such as:
(1) Who defines what “sustainable” in the employment relationship means?
(2) How do employees participate in conceptualizing sustainable HRM?
(3) How can sustainable HRM be measured, and what role does data from employees
play in this regard?
(4) How is sustainable HRM best put in conversation with other conceptualizations of
organizational sustainability, such as environmental sustainability?
This is not to say that sustainable HRM cannot also serve organizational goals. Sustainable
HRM might, for example, be helpful in establishing a stronger brand for employers seeking
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the best employee talent (App et al., 2012; Kryger Aggerholm et al., 2011). It can have positive
effects on employee commitment to their employers (Diaz-Carrion et al., 2018) and work to the
benefit of organizations generally as they seek competitive advantage (Guerci et al., 2014).
Focusing on sustainable HRM from the employee’s perspective, however, allows for a more
critical and normatively grounded analysis of the employment relationship as it affects
employees. It permits a greater focus on employee welfare and fairness in the employment
relationship (De Prins et al., 2014) as well as preventing harm to employees (Mariappanadar
and Kramar, 2014).
Such a stance is consistent with Greenwood and Van Buren’s (2017) call for a new
pluralist perspective on the employment relationship. New pluralism holds out the
possibility that employers and employees can engage in genuine partnerships based on
partial congruence on interests, even as their interests also diverge in part. Such
partnership is possible when employers and employees negotiate goals that are genuinely
shared rather than employees being coerced into adopting employer goals that may be
inimical to employee interests, as previously discussed. Further, new pluralism (Greenwood
and Van Buren, 2017, p. 669) “offers the possibility of decentralisation and local consensus,
preferring pragmatism brought about by local narratives that an organisation and its
employees both participate in constructing.” While old pluralism tends to think of conflict
between employers and employees as inevitable, new pluralism allows for creative thinking
about how conflicts can be managed for the benefit of both parties. Returning to the
Greenwood and Van Buren (2017) framework for analyzing claims related to unitarism—
which can be made in descriptive, normative and instrumental terms—I proffer two
normative claims about sustainable HRM:
Normative claim 1 about sustainable HRM: Employee-related outcomes should be a stronger and
more explicit focus of sustainable HRM scholarship and practice.
Normative claim 2 about sustainable HRM: Employee perspectives should be included within
sustainable HRM practice.
It is important to note what normative claims can and cannot do. Normative claims are
different from conceptual or empirical claims; as Greenwood and Van Buren (2017, p.
671) note, a normative claim “is a statement of what should be and thus is not falsifiable
through empirical evidence or evaluative analysis. Rather, arguments for and against
normative claims. . . must be made in ethical terms through appeal to widely agreedupon norms.” Normative claims are claims about ideals, seeking to advance a set of
values that are then the basis of debate on those terms rather than on whether they are
empirically true or false.
Normative claim 1 does not suggest that employee-related outcomes have not been a focus
of prior sustainable HRM scholarship. Indeed, they have been (see, for example, De Prins et al.,
2014; Kramar, 2014; Mariappanadar, 2012a and b): sustainable HRM has included concerns
about such outcomes in much the same way that work in socially responsible HRM has
(Newman et al., 2016). However, employee-related outcomes could be a more explicit focus of
work in sustainable HRM, and in so doing better connect social sustainability to
environmental sustainability. Normative claim 2 is focused on sustainable HRM practice,
and as such should push HRM managers and companies to bring employees into the
conversation about sustainability more strongly than they do now.
Both of these questions lead to a broader point: sustainable HRM, understood through the
prisms of employee outcomes and participation, can do two important things. First,
sustainable HRM can better integrate ethical concerns about employee treatment—long
present in critiques of HRM, particularly strategic HRM (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017)—
to the extent that the inclusion of employee perspectives is understood as essential to what it
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means for HRM to be truly sustainable. In this respect, sustainable HRM can become an
analytic framework for ethical analyses of HRM within academic scholarship as well as
ethical HRM practice. Second, sustainable HRM can become a framework for interrogating
imbalances on power in the employment relationship. Simply put, employment relationships
in which more powerful employers exploit less powerful employees—or that deny employees
meaningful voice and participation—are unlikely to be sustainable.
As noted previously, HRM itself is laden with ethical implications, whether recognized or
not (Greenwood, 2002). Further, normative work in stakeholder theory has recognized the
importance of including stakeholder for perspectives into organizational decision making as
a good outcome in and of itself (Phillips, 1997; Van Buren, 2001). Because employees are the
one essential stakeholder group for any organization and because they are affected by any
organizational decision—including decisions related to HRM generally and sustainable HRM
particularly, it follows that employee interests, perspectives, and participation should be
central to sustainable HRM. This includes not only considering how employee-related
outcomes are an explicit outcome of sustainable HRM, but also how employees participate in
organizational decision making about sustainable HRM. Bringing together descriptive and
instrumental claims, I argue that stronger inclusion of employee-related outcomes and
employee perspectives makes for the development of robust theoretical frameworks related
to sustainable HRM (instrumental claims) and also makes the success of sustainable HRM
initiatives more likely, based on strong empirical evidence (descriptive claims).
Implications for future research and practice
Taking a pluralistic perspective, this paper has argued, is essential for making the concept of
sustainable HRM more distinct, robust and inclusive of employee interests and participation.
Sustainable HRM can challenge the dominant unitarist perspective on the employment
relationship, focusing the attention of researchers on the extent to which employment
practices benefit both employers and employees while contributing to social sustainability
both within and outside of the employment context. In this section, I outline four future
pathways for research in this domain.
First, future research might usefully start by assessing, with qualitative and quantitative
methods, how employees conceptualize sustainable HRM and the extent to which their
conceptualizations differ from those of managers. As noted previously, sustainability has
multiple definitions, as does sustainable HRM. These differing definitions have implications
for the growth of sustainable HRM as a field, to be sure. However, more important for the
present analysis is whether employees and managers have differing definitions of sustainable
HRM. If this is so, then managers seeking to implement sustainable HRM might find that
employees with definitions differing from their own might not be as supportive of
sustainability initiatives. But more significantly, a mismatch in how managers and
employees define sustainable HRM might itself become a source of discord in the employment
relationship, as employees might well become more cynical towards their employers if the
latter claims to be promoting sustainability and sustainable HRM in ways that fail to account
for the former’s perspectives (Bush, 2018).
Second, research in this domain might also develop stronger conceptual frameworks that
link particular definitions of sustainable HRM to outcomes relevant to employers, employees
and society. Sustainable HRM has the potential to become a powerful framework that brings
together organizational concerns about performance with measures of sustainability as
defined by both organizations and their stakeholders. However, for this potential to be
realized more fully, it is necessary for sustainable HRM, however it is defined, to become more
conceptually robust. For example, Kramar (2014) discusses capability reproduction as one
stream of research within sustainable HRM. For capability reproduction to be practicable,
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however, it must be based on conceptual frameworks that link organizational outcomes with
outcomes associated with employee welfare and capabilities that then can be measured. This
is all the more important because of a paucity of research on employee outcomes in research
domains such as strategic HRM (Lengnick-Hall, 2009).
Third, future research might think about how specific bundles of HRM policies and
practices support various definitions of sustainability. This point is related to the previous
one about the need for stronger conceptual frameworks for sustainable HRM that can then
inform empirical research. There is considerable work, for example, about the effects of
different HRM bundles (Bello-Pintado, 2015; Jiang et al., 2012; Subramony, 2009) on
organizational performance. An analogy can be drawn with sustainable HRM: given a
specific conceptualization of it, what are the bundles of HRM practices that allow that
conceptualization to be realized by an organization? In this respect, research from a parallel
field—strategic HRM—can help sustainable HRM to become more fully theorized and
therefore useful to managers than it is at present.
Finally, sustainable HRM research might delve into normative considerations, addressing
what the purposes of HRM should be beyond narrow conceptualizations of employer benefit.
Sustainability as a concept, by its very nature, is morally laden. Bringing HRM together with
insights from sustainability scholarship allows for a more robust conversation about what
HRM should actually do and whose interests it should serve, the relative importance of
employer benefit associated with HRM practices vis-
a-vis outcomes experienced by
employees and other stakeholders, and ultimately whether HRM can ever be truly moral
at all (Greenwood, 2002). The promise of sustainable HRM scholarship is that it can allow for a
broader-ranging conversation about the purposes and outcomes of HRM than is currently
occurring, and in so doing bring ethical analysis squarely into the ambit of HRM research.
The analysis in this paper also has implications for HRM practice. First and
foremost, it is essential to note the importance of employee participation with regard to
sustainability. Second, the measurement of sustainable HRM at the organizational level
should take into account employee-related outcomes, which has noted before is a
weakness of much HRM scholarship and by extension practice (Lengnick-Hall et al.,
2009), particularly in the area of strategic HRM. Finally, sustainable HRM might
provide a lens for HRM professionals to address important ethical questions about the
HRM function as well as HRM practice.
Conclusion
Sustainable HRM at present offers an interesting and important set of ideas about how
HRM can contribute to a more just world and to more just organizations that are also
better placed to create competitive advantage. It offers the possibility of linking HRM to
employee welfare and societal well-being, in addition to other outcomes related to social
and environmental sustainability. Further, sustainable HRM can address power
imbalances in the employment relationship and in turn make HRM more ethically
oriented. This paper has offered some ideas about how the promise of sustainable HRM
might be better realized by explicit consideration of pluralism and power within HRM
scholarship and practice, as well as considered what future research in this domain
might look like. Sustainable HRM, it is hoped, can do much to challenge established
ways of thinking about HRM while advancing a vision of what HRM could become if it
was more ethically grounded and more inclusive of employee perspectives. This matters
for one essential reason: “the health of our planet for future generations is dependent on
new business models and systems that can effectively address the looming intertwined
social and environmental crises” (Westerman et al., 2020, p. 4).
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Corresponding author
Harry J. Van Buren III can be contacted at: [email protected]
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