Power to Law

Performance Enhances by Constraints



Research studies about Human Resource Management seldom have approached comprehensively and fail to converge upon a set of criteria for evaluating HR management systems. Human resource management proliferate assumptions applied to other areas in management studies. Through strategic reading managing HRs is to consider innovation, development and foresight in maintaining, optimizing and delivering higher standard of living for human resources in organisations, and business systems that brings about efficiency and effective use of such strategic resource. Managing HRs has to be attentive and recognize impacts of both internal and external environment in which the organisation performs which is relevant to achieve intended objectives.

Initiatives to converge benefits for all stakeholders including the society within a regulated and rational framework facilitate implementation of management efforts. Pursuing responsive, responsible and solution finding environment for all involved creates enabling organisations or business entities in which the sense of belonging is highly valued and strengthened that is essential for sustainable organisational development. Organisational development which justifies policies for project performance will add value to what already has been done as well as identifying where capacities need to be further developed. Environmental feedbacks are important for adjustments and accomplishing planned objectives. Strategic approach describe major phases involving human resource management by communicating feedbacks from environmental factors that provide inputs into the system to follow dynamic interactivities toward the processes namely throughputs in order to ultimately accomplish outputs that is constantly evaluated against intended results.

In a bigger picture economic, social and political organisations and their workforce are part of social system where their interests have to be fulfilled in order for the system to survive and develop. In an open system where these interests contradict, there are crucial points of intense activities for the management to focus on monitoring, evaluation and planning intervention. That is to say devising strategic, tactical and operational planning that brings interests’ of stakeholders closer and creating maximum benefits for society, individuals as well as organisations.

Some of the good practice that was mentioned in recent work on performance assessment is the need to align organisational incentives with learning, and adapt in the light of that learning. Further challenge is to build on individual competency which means developing and adapting management systems and processes so that they too evolve in the light of what we are learning about them. This requires an ability and skills to scrutinize and make sense of what is going on outside of the organisation and become more porous to the political, economic and social processes in which performance is immersed (Oxfam GB, 2005).

Significant social, intellectual, and technological changes are accruing with that the routines of professional life in business, and other domains that have been affected by the combination of new technologies and new management techniques. The internal cultures of organizations have been changing accordingly, usually in ways that make them more efficient and effective. These imply to growing need of organisations to engage in continuous learning to assemble higher capacity and motivate to compete for higher expertise. Lack of skilled human resources affects performance and productivity from many angles. Britain's business leaders have recognised the urgency of the task.

A recent survey by Lloyds TSB found that problems recruiting qualified staff were causing more boardroom headaches than either the threat of terror attacks or bird flu. And 48% of Britain's largest 2,000 companies said they were experiencing difficulties recruiting qualified workers (BBC, 2006). Leitch was alarming to report that the average French worker has become 20% more productive per hour than their British counterpart. In Germany they are 13% ahead. According to the Sector Skills Development Agency the UK is currently about the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world but in terms of human capital we languish in 17th place.

Capacity building and skill enhancement will help to perform sound management including the accountability of institutions to those they serve. The ability of institutions to help or harm people revolves around the quality of institutional interactions with people at all levels. Building capacity will enable people to make their interests known and taken into account. By increasing their voice and expressing their preferences more vividly they ensure that institutions truly respond to their needs. They will then have the means to provide feedback to institutions to enhance productivity. Regular, reliable and informative feedbacks are necessary tools for managers to perform as decision makers and pursue subsequent adjustments. These decisions are not made in vacuum emanated from dissatisfy minds of managers constraint by various interference. One study showed that when the rational choices of actors are constrained by a variety of normative and institutional constraints economic performance in societies is enhanced.

Institutional constraints on decision making defined as rational choices have dynamic effects on the balance of power among social forces. These constraints reflected in the rational behind formation of social entities. Lack of resources and feedbacks weaken accountability, legitimacy and learning as well as capability to bring about effective changes in system being private or public.

Although rules and regulations are components of organisational environment but mutual interaction between economy and law as well as power overlapping will reign. Social actors challenging big businesses have increasingly endorsed constraint that works to regulate shortcomings. By joining the forces to regulate norms and rules they ultimately become partners of the governing body. Their expertise and ways of communication to their adherents are mechanism of sustaining rules and regulations.

But most powerful businesses today are owned by shareholders pressing for voice as part of such economic network where actual founder sometimes as executive manager not controlling a majority of votes in the board. People in their role as investors challenge the agenda for best interests of the organisation with emphasis on ethical values on environment or other altruistic ideas. They have changed management objectives to the best interest of society and environment by endorsing restrictive rules and regulations and ultimately attacking the reputation of big businesses to adopt progressive social policies. As a result social actors and activist shareholders are now being taken seriously in many board rooms, and increasing numbers of corporations are taking their agenda into account in making business decisions.

An overwhelming 91% of those interviewed in annual Mori Poll in 2005 suggest that public policy and governments should encourage businesses to take their responsibilities more seriously, and to work to improve the social impacts of their products and services and stated that this will affect their choice of which products or service to buy. Campaign initiatives alike have turned to a comprehensive political, regulatory, legal and economic assault on corporate reputations and business practices that instigate a great deal of pressure on management through naming and shaming, filing legal action or boycotting products and ultimately enforcing desired constraints.

Having said that it emerges that the more we assume and elaborate on power of people, the more we elevate and extend the power of regulators and rule makers. It functions as positive feedback in escalating constraint orders in democratic contexts. Those engaged in the government way of life and those who are driven by ethical principles are keen on control and regulation. They believe they know best. The complexity of social machinery in democratic environments has functioned in a way to devolve more power to rules and regulations in every corner. These democratic practices are extending further. Ever more power lies in law. Engineered governance will exercise increasing power in future over private entities. At present more political and social actors in advance economies advocate for rule–resource institutional framework rather than liberation.

This translates to the fact that processes of legal action and institutions reciprocally shape and are shaped by economic action. Because rules and legality are socially constructed, it likewise affects the economy through a multi-dimensional set of social mechanisms, rather than by calculations of benefits only. Similarly, law helps constitute not just economic interests, strategies and power, but also everyday economic meanings, identities, roles, relationships and structures, and norms, values, ideas and ideals, including the concept of economic rationality itself.




Refernces:

Robin Stryker , 2006, Mind the gap: law, institutional analysis and socioeconomics, Oxford Univ Press

Erik Olin Wright, 2006, Beneficial constraints: beneficial for whom? , Oxford Univ Press

Murray Armstrong, Survey shows nine out of 10 want ethical feedback, Guardian, 28 Nov, 2005

Oxfam programme framework and strategic programme management, 2003

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/evaluation/

(www. dfid.gov.uk) and R4D – DFID’s research portal
(www.research4development.info)

J. A. Allan, Oxford Center for Water Research, 2006
www.ocwr.ox.ac.uk