HRM and disenfranchisement: Working beyond organizational boundaries to tackle societal barriers

Abstract

From a practical perspective, employers have the potential to serve as an important societal mechanism for tackling grand challenges like disenfranchisement because they wield significant financial, social, human, and political capital. We posit that they may also have an obligation to take positive action to help solve issues in the community in which they operate. One of the main ways in which employers interact with society is through the labor market, as represented by the human resource management (HRM) function. We believe that HRM has significant capacity for addressing disenfranchisement beyond the boundaries of the organization through both functional and normative policies and programs. Based on recent ethics-HRM scholarship, we go beyond the typical business case approach to present a moral argument based in utilitarian and universal theoretical perspectives for why employers should seek to mitigate the impact of George et al.'s (2016) four societal barriers that lead to disenfranchisement. We build a 2 × 3 matrix model based on HRM's societal support role (Podgorodnichenko, Edgar, & McAndrew, 2020), as well as pictorial models, that provides practical recommendations related to the HRM responsibility areas of staffing, compensation, and training and development designed to prevent disenfranchisement.