Human Resource Management in Service Work

Citation

James, P. (2002), "Human Resource Management in Service Work", Employee Relations, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 461-463. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2002.24.4.461.1

The significant and continuing growth of service industry work has generated a growing interest in the nature of human resource management within the sector and how and in what ways, it differs from that in more “traditional” sectors, such as manufacturing. The volume under review makes an important contribution to the emerging debates on these issues and in doing so highlights the value, not to say importance, of locating them within a sociologically informed analysis of service work.

In terms of focus, the author does not attempt to provide a detailed exploration of all forms of service industry work. Instead, he focuses attention on the work and management of “front line” staff, who are directly involved in the provision of services to customers in the “mass‐customised and medium‐customised market segments”. However, one chapter somewhat broadens this focus to encompass a consideration of how the work and management of sales staff differ from those of front‐line personnel.

Notwithstanding the above restriction of focus, the book is wide‐ranging in terms of the breadth of issues covered. For example, it contains a detailed discussion of the different types of service work and how they may be distinguished from that in manufacturing. It also reviews and critiques the differing analytical perspectives that have been adopted in relation to such work and provides relatively short, but insightful, examinations of front‐line work in three different settings – hospitality, health care and the, almost ubiquitous, call centres. It also encompasses chapters which explore staff empowerment, emotional labour, gender segregation and disadvantage and the current and future roles and strategies of trade unions. As a result, it is inevitably impossible in a short review to do justice to the scope, as well as quality, of the analysis provided by the author. Nevertheless, several aspects of the author’s analysis do merit particular comment.

The first of these is the danger, not to say inappropriateness, of adopting universalistic analytical positions with regard to the nature of service work and its management. Korczynski, for example, provides effective rebuttals of the unitarist and Utopian prescriptions of the “new service management school”, that embody the view that the adoption of a particular range of human resource techniques can unproblematically create a win‐win‐win relationship between management, staff, and customers. In a similar vein, he also highlights the weaknesses associated with Ritzer’s “McDonaldisation” thesis and draws attention to the limitations of Hochschild’s view that emotional labour is inevitably harmful to workers. Moreover, in putting forward these critiques, the author rightly draws attention to a central analytical weakness of much existing work in the field, namely the “tendency for analysts to have a mono‐focus on a single key imperative driving the nature of front‐line work”.

This weakness, in turn, leads the author to argue for a more rounded mode of analysis that enables front‐line service work to be located within the dual and contradictory, organisational imperatives of minimising cost and delivering customer‐oriented service. It also leads him to argue further, against this background, that a fundamental function of human resource management is to create and maintain a “fragile social order” in the face of these contradictory pressures.

More specifically, the author utilises the concept of a customer‐oriented bureaucracy to provide a framework within which the analysis of front‐line service work and its human resource management can be located. This concept embodies the contradictory pressures arising in the employment relationship as a result of the previously identified “dual imperatives” of cost‐minimisation and customer‐orientation. In doing so, it also encompasses the contradictory features of two other, related, sets of relationships. First, those existing between service organisations and their customer. Second, those subsisting between front‐line staff and customers. Indeed, the discussion provided of the triad of relationships that exists between service organisations, employees and customers constitutes an important strength of the book.

The implications of these contradictory elements of front‐line service work forms a, if not the, central theme of the book. In particular, they lead the author to convincingly argue that front‐line service work is a source of both “pleasure and pain” for workers. Thus, front‐line workers are seen to be confronted not only with tensions arising from the need to be efficient and customer‐oriented, but also with the potential to gain satisfaction from their interactions with customers.

The notion of the customer‐oriented bureaucracy is used sensitively to explore the work experiences and management of front‐line staff in the three different employment settings examined, as well as the issues of empowerment, gender segregation and emotional labour. In addition, it is used to inform a stimulating chapter, which explores the relationship between trade unions and service work and, in particular, considers what strategies unions can adopt in order to enhance their organisation of front‐line staff. In short, the analysis provided leads the author to stress the need for union strategies to be informed by the daily, and contradictory, experiences of front‐line workers. It further leads him, from this starting‐point, to argue that “appropriate union strategies are unlikely to fit neatly either the partnership or organising model of union strategy, but are more likely to be based on an interplay between both approaches”. Clearly, not all readers will be convinced by this prognosis. However, whether it is seen as viable or not, the arguments advanced by the author to support it merit attention. The same is true of his more specific argument that unions can usefully seek to organise around an agenda of seeking to civilise both the production and consumption of services and thereby aiming to create a coalition between producer and consumer interests.

Overall then, the author has succeeded in writing a stimulating and highly readable book that simultaneously extends the literature on service industry work human resource management and highlights the critical need to locate it within a detailed examination of the nature of such work. In addition, the author’s analysis provides a useful reminder that far too much of the existing literature on strategic human resource pays insufficient attention to the analytical importance of the work context and hence operates at an unacceptable level of abstraction. It also points to the dangers of too easily overstating the distinctiveness of the role and nature of human resource management in the service sector, particularly given, as the author notes, that the tensions which surround it parallel those found in studies that have examined the application of total quality management in more “traditional” sectors of the economy. Consequently, for this reader, while the book demonstrates the need to develop the study of human resource management further in the service sector, it also effectively cautions against throwing “the baby out with the bath water”.