General Editors’ Preface

Abstract

For many workers, the ‘employer’ is not a person but a complex organizational entity involving a web of relationships with co-workers, supervisors, external contractors, customers, and service users. It is also not merely the place where we go to work. Employing organizations sometimes operate like mini-states. They wield significant coercive powers over workers with finely tuned mechanisms of disciplinary control. As collectivism has declined in many countries, the regulatory gap has been filled by a new cadre of specialists in Human Resource Management (HRM). While HRM partners are often charged with the stewardship of employee well-being, they are indisputably an instrument of management. In terms of the workplace constitution, HRM often blends functions of the executive, judiciary, and the formulation and enactment of workplace rules. This belies any notion that there might be a separation of powers in the post-collectivist workplace. In this important new monograph, Dr Adriana Orifici examines the role and functions of the workplace investigation in the governance of modern firms. The workplace investigation performs a multiplicity of goals. It ensures that the employer complies with its workplace duties in ensuring a safe and healthy working environment. It is both a disciplinary mechanism for addressing wrongdoing and a way of ensuring due process for workers accused of serious misconduct. It also provides a tool for ensuring managerial supervision and control, exercised rationally in the interests of the firm and its shareholders. The adjustment of these sometimes-conflicting goals is mediated by HRM. Dr Orifici explores the interactions between statute law, judicial decisions, and the localized ‘law’ of the workplace in the development of workplace investigations.

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