Graduate Employability and the Principle of Potentiality: An Aspect of the Ethics of HRM Bogdan Costea • Kostas Amiridis • Norman Crump Received: 27 June 2011 / Accepted: 28 July 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract The recruitment of the next generation of workers is of central concern to contemporary HRM. This paper focuses on university campuses as a major site of this process, and particularly as a new domain in which HRM’s ethical claims are configured, in which it sets and answers a range of ethical questions as it outlines the ‘ethos’ of the ideal future worker. At the heart of this ethos lies what we call the ‘principle of potentiality’. This principle is explored through a sample of graduate recruitment pro- grammes from the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, interpreted as ethical exhortations in HRM’s attempt to shape the character of future workers. The paper brings the work of Georg Simmel to the study of HRM’s ethics and raises the uncomfortable question that, within discourses of endless potentiality, lie ethical dangers which bespeak an unrecognised ‘tragedy of culture’. We argue that HRM fashions an ethos of work which de-recognises human limits, makes a false promise of absolute freedom, and thus becomes a tragic proposition for the individual. Keywords Recruitment Á University Á Ethos Á Morality Á Potential Á Simmel Introduction Studies of the experience of HRM’s ethics have predomi- nately concentrated upon intra-organisational dynamics (Townley 1994; Legge 1995; Winstanley and Woodall 2000; Greenwood 2002). Legge (in Mabey et al. 1998, p. 15) talks of the privileging of the managerial stratum (Wood 1995, 1996; Huselid 1995) and the marginalising of the concerns of those on the ‘shop or office floor’, who are excluded or disproportionately represented in analyses of HRM and its ethics (e.g. Millward et al. 1992). This paper introduces an aspect of HRM’s expansion which is becoming increasingly noteworthy: practices of employability within universities. It focuses on the UK university sector that has witnessed the growth of an intricate and increasingly structured apparatus of job and internship recruitment. Employability, with its arsenal of ideas, images and practices, has become a stable channel for targeting the student body long before employment itself begins. Universities are now significant sites where HRM’s ethics features as a compulsory experience for students trying to make sense of the value of their studies. This pressing question allows certain HRM discourses and practices to promote a vision of the future employee (talented, creative, dynamic, and full of potential) which students are encouraged to pursue if they are to secure access to highly valued positions. We investigate how this ideal character is formulated as a form of directing students’ understanding of employment. Including students in discussions of HRM’s ethics is especially important because: (a) they are more susceptible and more vulnerable to HRM’s moral imperatives; (b) they lack the sources of organised and collective political rep- resentation (to such an extent that student unions them- selves are colonised by the concern with their members’ B. Costea (&) Á K. Amiridis Á N. Crump Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK e-mail: b.costea@lancaster.ac.uk K. Amiridis e-mail: k.amiridis@lancaster.ac.uk N. Crump e-mail: n.crump@lancaster.ac.uk 123 J Bus Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1436-x