Case analysis
• assess your understanding of theories about employment relations (Systems theories* Marxist approaches**) and in particular the main stakeholders and actors in employment relations (5 P’s and Ulrich theories)
• draw on knowledge of relevant theories, concepts, debates and controversies about HRM
TMA 01 question
Write a paper of 2500 words in answer to the following question:
• There are various stakeholders in the employment relations landscape, including the State, Employer Associations, Management and Trade Unions. Identify the main interests of each of these main stakeholders, and critically examine the ways in which they may (or may not) impact on the practice of HRM.
TMA 01 guidance
Remember to draw upon your learning from all of the first three units of this module. This includes the readings, the audio-visual material and the activities which you have undertaken as well as the core online learning material.
You should:
• identify the various stakeholders of employment relations and critically discuss their main aims and functions
• discuss the extent to which theoretical models explain any variance in the ‘behaviours’ of these main stakeholders
• critically discuss how the aims and functions of the main stakeholders potentially impact on human resource management practices in organisations; use recent research in your answer, as appropriate
• reference correctly; marks will be deducted if you do not do this properly.
*Box 1.3: Dunlop’s System Theory (1958)
The actors include :
• a hierarchy of management and their representatives
• a hierarchy of employees and their representatives
• third party bodies such as state/governmental agencies.
The environmental context includes:
• technology
• the characteristics of the labour force
• market or budgetary constraints
• the distribution of power in wider society.
Interaction between the parties is grounded in a common set of beliefs, behavioural expectations or ideology that is shared by all actors and thus binds the parties together.
Source: adapted from Dibben, Klerck and Wood (2011)
** Box 1.4: Marxist approaches
The term ‘employment relations’ does not exist in the writing of Karl Marx because the regulation of the class struggle through the institutional channels of conflict resolution was unknown at the time. The core institutions however, underpinning industrial relations – free markets and the factory system – were main components of Marx’s analysis of industrial capitalism. Marx approved of the growth of trade unions but his intellectual focus was not on their functions as regulators of wages and other employment conditions but on their role as organising of workers’ resistance against exploitation, estrangement and impoverishment, leading to the eventual overthrow of the capitalist wage system. For Marxists, the class struggle to achieve this objective has to continue until the final victory of full industrial democracy is achieved either by revolutionary actions or by social reforms.
Extract from ‘Marxist Approaches’ by Gennard and Judge (2013, p. 44)
