Werner Nienhueser: Empirical Research on Human Resource Management as a Production of Ideology
ality of HRM and working life this reflects. Individual statements like: ”x per cent of
employees are satisfied“, ”y per cent have resigned“, ”z per cent have a high level of
stress in the workplace“ or ”the correlation between satisfaction and performance in
the sample is r = 0.XY“ may well apply, or not – but this is not the bottom line. It is
more important to say how selective, biased and one-sided the entirety of the statements
is that constitute the ”image“ of HRM (in the broader sense) and why such an
image comes about. I will therefore not label individual statements and studies as
ideological ones.
I will proceed as follows: First I will outline the framework of reference, on which
my analysis is based. This includes an explanation of the concept of ideology which I
use. After that, I will go into the methodological and empirical basis of my analysis as
well as some problems related to it (Section 2). This is followed by the actual analysis
(Section 3). I attach importance to those areas of research in particular that are related
to the exchange relationship in companies. Exchanging labour against wages (the reward-effort
bargain) and the legitimisation of this exchange relationship make up the
substance of what corporate HRM deals with. In Section 4 I will summarise all findings
and try to describe the image that empirical HRM research draws of ”Human Resource
Management“, and what the implications are for justifying the constitution of
the exchange between capital and labour.
2. Analytical framework, conceptual and methodological definitions
2.1 Analytical framework
The basic idea of the analytical framework6 is first of all that the socio-cognitive conditions
of reproduction of empirical research affect and influence views of corporate
HRM. Second, these views themselves develop impacts which I define as ideological.
The images of corporate HRM are not generated solely based on results from empirical
research. To do so would overestimate their influence. Images of exchange between
capital and labour are more strongly affected by general world views, which in
turn were generated by socialisation and selection processes. People who are imprinted
by a liberal (market) world view will have a different perception of the corporate
exchange relationship than someone whose world view focuses on the importance
of irreconcilable extremes between capital and labour (Figure 1).
The assumption that the socio-cognitive conditions of reproduction influence
certain views of corporate HR management is of particular significance for my essential
argument. They affect the “production” of the cognitive (to some extent also
normative) “raw material” of our view of HRM. I include the following items under
the term socio-cognitive conditions of reproduction: (i) selectivity with regard to topics
and the type of questions of empirical HRM research, (ii) valuations in the interest
of the employers, (iii) the focus on certain research objects (e.g. mainly on specialists
and executive staff) as well as (iv) selectivity arising from restricted access to informa-
6 A theoretically based explanatory model of the development and effects of ideologies
would be preferential to an analytical framework, but there is no space here for developing
such a model.