Empowerment: HR Strategies for Service Excellence

Citation

Collins, D. (2002), "Empowerment: HR Strategies for Service Excellence", Employee Relations, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 232-235. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2002.24.2.232.2

This book is a revised and up‐dated second edition of Lashley’s Empowering Service Excellence: Beyond the Quick‐fix, which was first published in 1997. Since I now try to avoid publications which have buzzwords such as “excellence” and “empowerment” in their titles I had prepared myself to dislike this work – let us face it, texts with titles such as Empowerment: HR Strategies for Service Excellence rank alongside Living with Syphilis in that category of works entitled “books you should not read on the train”.

I do, of course, have certain reservations (both structural and conceptual) about this book (having these after all is central to the reviewer’s job description) but I should concede from the outset that despite my advanced preparation I do not in fact dislike this work. Indeed, in a market crowded with guru‐inspired nonsense this text stands out as a work which seeks to analyse empowerment in a political, contextual and theoretical manner. In this regard Lashley is to be applauded for producing a text which offers students and practitioners three service sector case studies on empowerment, and a lucid introduction to a range of concepts, debates and controversies which are seldom aired when the concept of empowerment is discussed in managerial circles.

However, I remain troubled by the title of this work, even when I set aside my aversion to buzzwords, because there appears to be a mismatch between the title and the text of this work. At one level the title of Lashley’s work seems to suggest an ambition to enter the (lucrative) segment of the practitioner market, which peddles Heathrow Organization Theory (Burrell, 1997). Yet, at the same time there is much in the text itself to suggest that this is actually an introductory textbook for students, albeit one with a “sexy” title (publishers have strange ideas about sex and sexiness, I have found).

I accept, of course, that it should be possible to design a book which can straddle the student‐practitioner markets effectively, but I do not think Lashley has managed fully to bridge the gulf between these two groups. Books aimed at a student audience typically need to introduce their readers to theoretical ideas, and so tend devote a lot of text to rather abstract ideas and concepts. In contrast, however, successful managerial texts need to display an action focus, since practising managers (in the USA and the UK at least) tend to give short shrift to the pedantry of theoreticians (Huczynski, 1993). Unfortunately, in attempting to capture both the student and the practitioner market segments I fear that Lashley has produced a text which is too conceptual for the practitioner and perhaps a little too managerialist for the classroom. Furthermore, I feel sure that both of these sets of readers would feel confused and threatened by Lashley’s rather casual, almost throwaway references to complex ideas and concepts such as anomie and discourse. For example, is it sensible to assume that practising hotel managers have a prior working knowledge of Durkheim’s sociology?

As a (so‐called) specialist reader, I too, found myself suffering from confusion as I read this work. In Chapter 3 for example, where I find myself listed as an “ardent critic”, Lashley suggests that the existing literature on empowerment is flawed insofar as it fails to address the “motivational and psychological dimensions” of empowerment. Yet this chapter scarcely mentions these dimensions and seems to conclude by suggesting that a piece of my own work illuminates (in some small way) the very motivational and psychological dimensions of empowerment that myself and others had just been accused of neglecting!

This leads me to the main problems I have with this work at the theoretical and conceptual levels. My first concern amounts, perhaps, to little more than a linguistic quibble and may in the final analysis serve only to illustrate why practitioners avoid both the company and the works of academics. Nevertheless, I will air my quibble because I think it has relevance for the study of empowerment in particular and change in general.

Empowerment, Lashley tells us, is to do with “feelings” and “motivations”. From this perspective empowerment and empowering become dynamic processes; movement is all. Yet, despite this Lashley has a tendency to invoke a form of language which fixes and stabilises empowerment; turning it into a “thing”, which might be grasped or apprehended. Thus, despite his apparent commitment to process, Lashley tells us that we need to come to an understanding of the “state” of empowerment. If we are to analyse contemporary developments in process terms (and I think we should) we will all have to exercise more care in our use of language (Chia and King, 1997).

My second main concern focuses on the claims Lashley makes for the scope and significance of his own contribution to the debates on empowerment. Lashley tells us that his text will articulate and thence resolve the fundamental problems which currently restrict our understanding of empowerment. Viewed in these terms, I did wonder if it might have been more appropriate to have sub‐titled the book as: the “third way”. To understand Lashley’s “third way” we need to be clear on the ideas which underpin his appreciation of empowerment in the service sector.

Lashley argues that the service sector makes distinctive demands on its employees. He also argues that any useful modelling of empowerment must take care to disentangle the concept of empowerment from its closely related baggage of institutions and structures because empowerment is primarily concerned with people, with “feelings” and with notions of self‐efficacy. These arguments cause me no special discomfort. However, I find it difficult to accept the subsequent stages of Lashley’s argument when he proceeds to argue that the existing literature on empowerment is doubly flawed because “neither [critical nor normative traditions] considers empowerment to cover a range of different initiatives that alter the [employment] relationship in different ways” and because “these accounts of empowerment … rarely consider the psychological state of empowerment or how it feels to be empowered” (p. x).

Taking these assertions in turn: we should note that while the normative/prescriptive literature discussed by Lashley tends to obscure the ambiguity of empowerment, it is wholly inaccurate to suggest that the critical analyses of empowerment which have appeared in this journal (Collins, 1998) and elsewhere (Wilkinson, 1998) fail to analyse empowerment in terms of ambiguity.

On Lashley’s second assertion, we should perhaps concede that the rush to debunk movements and ideals such as empowerment did, for a time, produce analyses that were not sensitive to the subtle complexities of empowerment. But it would be wrong to suggest that critical studies of empowerment still fail to investigate the motivational and psychological dimensions of empowerment. Indeed, some five years ago Wilkinson et al. (1997) argued that critical scholarship should make greater efforts to recognise the space for action that remains between the “bouquets” of guru theorising and the “brickbats” of critical theorising when they argued that scholars were “blinkered” in their understanding of workers’ experiences.

All of which makes me wonder if Taylor had a point about the importance of specialisation!