Employee control, ethics and politics - GHRM in context

This chapter addresses three issues in Green Human Resource Management (GHRM), namely how it balances control and commitment, its political meanings, and its ethical assumptions. It provides the implications of these issues for human resource management (HRM) researchers and practitioners. The dichotomy between commitment and control has characterized the evolution of organization studies and of the HRM field in particular. However, the rhetorical shift from personnel management to HRM is considered as an ideological reconfiguration of the field, which creates room for more sophisticated forms of managerial control. The critical management studies community has deeply explored the political connotation of the systems, highlighting how the growing orientation of corporations towards environmental sustainability can be conceived as a hegemonic move. As a consequence, ethics contributions point out the need to simultaneously address 'the three justice dimensions of sustainability: intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and justice towards nature'.