Our contribution in this paper is to highlight the ethical implications of workforce engagement strategies in an age of austerity. Hard or instrumentalist approaches to workforce engagement create the potential for situations where engaged employees are expected to work ever longer and harder...

Purpose – Aims to draw attention to how managers actively re‐construct inherent contradictions characterising the employment relationship that in the service sector, are rooted in drives for increased efficiency and customer‐oriented behaviours. Design/methodology/approach – Presents a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present case study evidence of how managers in a contract catering firm made sense of an organisational change initiative that encouraged them to become self‐sufficient and display “entrepreneurial” behaviours in an environment where they were...

This paper presents a discourse‐analytic approach to the study of human resource management (HRM) and organisational change, which is more sensitive than conventional research designs to the dynamic role of language in shaping processes of change. The prevailing positivism within business and...

This article uses discourse theory to examine the rhetoric of human resource management (HRM) in shaping organisational change. Built on the assumptions that people actively construct their “organisational world” and that language is central to these processes of social construction, HRM is...

Purpose – The discourse of human resource management (HRM) is increasingly dominated by a normative, consensus‐oriented perspective on managing the employment relationship. This paper aims to explore the potential of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to provide new and different...