Cold wars and hot issues: management of responsibilities

摘要

HR research rarely focuses on ethical issues and on moral legacies embedded in employees' cultural software. Ignoring the latter can result in a failure to assess important criteria of strategic HR policies, which should not stop at the factory door or at state borders. Recent HR problems experienced in the post-communist countries are cases in point. Hidden injuries of the Cold War include not only the obsolete Russian nuclear submarines waiting for their radioactive spills to enter global food chains. Less visible, but equally dangerous is a moral and an ethical fall-out from Stalinism and the failure to de-Stalinize. An authoritarian mind-set prevents ex-Soviet citizens from discovering, developing and maintaining civic entrepreneurship. Might (of the state) becomes right (for an individual). Lack of civic entrepreneurship makes redefining collective identity and coming to terms with responsibilities difficult. The emergence of a symbolic cemetery of Polish officers, the prisoners-of-war murdered on Stalin's orders in 1940, allows us to trace a mechanism for making state violence transparent and for acknowledging collective responsibilities. Is there a lesson to be learned in managing a social learning process in spite of the learned irresponsibility of 'authoritarian personalities'? Can coming to terms with state-controlled genocide provide a starting point for a re-educational campaign and for coaching in civic virtues? Can the management of moral legacies and ethical responsibilities become part and parcel of a future HR policy for a globally networked world?