Estudio temporal de las características críticas de calidad

The professional and academic literature on the impact of reces- sions on the conduct of HRM can be divided into accounts of human resource (HR) practices appropriate to handling reductions in business demand or other commercial setbacks (for example,

pay freezes, pay cuts, short-time working and redundancies) and interpretations of the implications of recession for the nature of and direction of HRM practice. Here the focus will be on the second type of accounts, as such a focus provides a better understanding of what the recession may mean for both the short-term and longer- term conduct of HRM (see Roche et al., 2010: 29–40 for a detailed discussion of different HR practices used in recessions and of their implementation).

Two broad understandings of the effects of recession on HRM can be identifi ed in the international literature. These have been informed in the main by previous serious recessions during the 1980s, especially in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), and by the refl ections of professionals and scholars on the effects of the ‘Great Recession’ that affected much of the developed world following the international fi nancial crisis and severe con- traction in economic activity that began in 2007.

One approach claims that recessions are transformative, fun- damentally altering HRM and work and employment practices more generally. The exponents of this approach, however, disa- gree on the nature or direction of the transformations they claim that recessions bring about. One perspective, heavily infl uenced by an interpretation of the 1980s recession in the US, is that recession acts as a catalyst for the emergence and spread of a ‘market-driven’ model of HRM in which, in addition to a pervasive rise in the inci- dence of downsizing, employment security for those who remain in their jobs undergoes permanent decline, the psychological contract between fi rms and employees comes to pivot around utilitarian or economic calculations of short-term advantage, fi rms become more prone to hiring rather than to investing in developing talent and neither fi rms nor their employees any longer expect long-term career progression to be a standard feature of HR arrangements. Firms also become more prone to considering whether they need to retain an internally resourced HRM function, or indeed whether they require any specialist HR function at all.

The paradigmatic contribution along these lines is Peter Cap- pelli’s The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce (1999a; and see Cappelli, 1999b). While the starting point for Cap- pelli’s work was the US recession of the 1980s, strong echoes of this perspective are to be found in more recent work on the effects of the Great Recession. Some international consulting fi rms claim

that the outsourcing and off-shoring of HRM has accelerated in the recession and that HR functions have been more affected by these developments than other management functions such as informa- tion technology (IT). This putative trend implies a non-recoverable loss in specialist HR jobs within fi rms (The Hackett Group, 2009a and 2009b). Other commentators have claimed that there has been an acceleration during the recession in the prevalence within fi rms of a so-called ‘new employment deal’. Refl ecting the new deal at work, employees no longer expect career progression within their current fi rms, have come to rely on themselves for career advance- ment and have become subject to more ‘personalised’ arrangements with respect to rewards, talent management and human resource development (HRD) (Towers Watson, 2010).

While wedded to the notion that recession is transformative for HRM, other commentators hold an alternative view of what trans- formation involves. David Ulrich (as reported in Brockett, 2010: 11; and in Personnel Today, 2008) has proposed that increasing numbers of HR leaders are seizing the opportunity presented to them by the recession to become business partners and to position their organi- sations for the long term by investing in skills and in the creation of positive organisational cultures. A similar view has been put forward by Cary Cooper (2009), who claims that the recession has presented an opportunity to HR managers to demonstrate their capacity to manage talent and to create organisational cultures that motivate employees in a period of uncertainty. Outside the realms of HR ‘gurudom’, scholars like Mohrman and Worley (2009) also suggest that case studies of HR in leading US fi rms show that the recession is acting as a catalyst for more fl uid organisational struc- tures and more intensive and strategic ways of harnessing the talent and creativity of employees in pursuit of business objectives. The views of contributors like Ulrich, Cooper, and Mohrman and Worley seem to point implicitly or explicitly in the direction of the Great Recession as a catalyst for the more intensive or pervasive adoption by fi rms of a high commitment model of HRM, allied with the pursuit of effi ciencies and cost reductions in the operation of HR systems and with more stringent approaches to performance management. All of these developments are seen to be powered by strategic HR leaders and business partners who persuade fi rms to look over the horizon of recessionary conditions and position fi rms and their HR strategies for recovery and return to growth.

If one perspective on the effects of recession on HRM points towards transformation or disjuncture, other contributors are more measured and more empirically orientated in their assessment of how recession impacts on HRM. Critics of apocalyptic claims about the effects of 1980s recessions have taken writers like Cappelli severely to task for misinterpreting changes that were in essence cyclical and therefore transient in nature for changes of a perma- nent nature in work and employment arrangements (Jacoby, 1999a, 1999b; McGovern et al., 2007). These contributors have empha- sised continuities in work and employment patterns that are not greatly or permanently altered by recessionary episodes. A number of commentaries on the effects of the Great Recession chime with these assessments by presenting measured and cautious reviews of recent developments. It has been noted that fi rms in the UK have tried to buffer or preserve employment as much as possible during the recession and have often also sought to preserve a philosophy which treated human resources as assets rather than costs (Brown and Reilly, 2009). The imperative for HR managers to ‘stick to the knitting’ during the recession by preserving established HR polices has also been urged by some HR consultant commentators (Griffi n and Smith, 2010). Reviews of developments in industrial relations have noted that the picture emerging is full of contradictions, com- plexities and challenges (Acas, 2008 and 2009).

To this measured strand of analysis and commentary can be added empirically informed commentaries on the effects of the recession on trends in employment in HRM. A survey in the UK by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that while HR jobs were being lost, one in fi ve fi rms intended to recruit additional staff in their HR departments to cope with the burden of managing redundancy and other recessionary measures. There was also an expectation on the part of HR professionals that the balance of HR activity would change in a more strategic direc- tion and that fewer would be engaged in transactional HR work (Phillips, 2008). Public service organisations in the UK were found to have engaged in cutting back HR numbers to ratios more compa- rable with the private sector and to be seeking effi ciencies through shared service provision and the creation of inter-agency centres of excellence (Pickard, 2010).

In this second perspective on the effects of recessions, contrib- utors therefore avoid thinking in terms of transformations – in

whatever direction – and point instead to a more complex picture involving many changes, some of which may abide and others of which may be transitory, but also involving strong elements of continuity with pre-recession HR practices and arrangements. The overall pattern of change is not understood in terms of any consistent or coherent shift towards a new set of work and employ- ment arrangements or a new HR paradigm.