Abstract

 Purpose

     This paper points out that common human resource manageement (HRM) research and practice have overlooked employee’s class of origin. Workers’ class of origin can be seen as “the elephant in the room” in current HRM, being that it significantly affects organizational decision-making with negative social (increased class-based inequality) and organizational (inefficient allocation of human re-sources) effects.

Design/methodology/approach

     The paper summarizes the partial, fragmented and multi-disciplinary literature on HRM and employees’ social class of origin.

Findings

     The paper shows how recruiting, selection, training and development practices systematically reinforce class-based inequality by providing high-class employees with more resources and opportunities compared to low-class employees.

Practical implications

     The paper provides sustainable HR practitioners, educators and researchers with recommendations on how to address employees’ social class of origin, improving organizational competitive advantage and reducing class-based inequality at the societal level.

Originality/value

     The paper focuses on a topic which, in diversity management, is an elephant in the room (i.e. workers social class of origin).

Introduction

     In modern societies, individuals’ position in a social hierarchy is supposed to depend only on their merit and not on ascribed characteristics (Bell, 1973). Common human resource manageement (HRM) research and practice have supported this shift from ascription to merit; diversity management, in particular, aims at avoiding bias and discrimination against employees based on visible and invisible ascribed characteristics like gender, age, race, physical ability/disability, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity (e.g. K€ollen, 2021).

     Social stratification research provides extensive empirical evidence that individuals’ class of origin has a substantial and stable effect on occupational careers, above and beyond other ascribed characteristics, as well as merit-related variables such as education level (Goldthorpe, 2003). However, several scholars have recognized that common HRM practice tends to ignore an employee’s class of origin (e.g. Bidwellet al., 2013; Cobb, 2016; Dundon and Rafferty, 2018; Grothe-Hammer and Kohl, 2020; Jonsen et al., 2011), even when considering diversity management practices (Jonsen et al., 2021; Ricc
o and Guerci, 2014). For example, a recent analysis of DiversityInc’s 2019 list of 50 companies shows that “not a single company statement referred to social class” (Ingram and Oh, 2022, p. 6). Likewise, employees’ class of origin is rarely considered in common HRM research (Loignon and Woehr, 2018). As such, HRM practice contributes to the reproduction of class-based inequality in the workplace (van Dijk et al., 2020; Avent-Holt and Tomaskovic-Devey, 2019), e.g. in terms of the “class ceiling” (Ingram and Oh, 2022).

Conclusions

     This paper is a first attempt to render sustainable HRM practice, education and research sensitive to the concept of class-based inequality. Neglecting class-based inequalities does not only make organizations inequality reproducers, with negative effects on their social legitimacy; it also jeopardizes organizational performance, in particular through inefficient staff deployment and/or negative attitudes and behaviors of low-class employees due to discrimination and unequal treatment. We have shown how common HRM practices like recruitment and selection, as well as training and development, directly influence the social mobility of employees and thereby contribute to social inequality. Building on these analyses, we have provided the sustainable HRM community with some recommendations on how to avoid class-based inequality. We have also made some suggestions as to how future sustainable HRM studies can support such efforts.