Reports on the conference on Ethical Issues in Contemporary Human Resource Management, held in April 1996. Notes concerns raised at the conference relating to a lowering of employment standards. These included factors such as: insecurity and risk, transfer of risk and surveillance and control....

Considers the ethics of the “new pay”, a prescriptive model of pay management which has exercised increasing influence over reward practice in recent years. Makes two primary criticisms of the new pay ‐ that it seeks to impose excessive risk on employees and that it affords little scope...

A persistent theme in writing on personnel management has been the relative marginality of the personnel function within the management team as a whole (see Legge pp. 50–7) and Poole (p. 97). Because of its indirect contribution to the raising of profits, human resources management has tended...