Content area
Full Text
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT David G., Collings and Geoffery Wood, Human Resource Management: A Critical Approach, Routledge, London, 2009, xi+319pp, £26.99, Soft.
The replacement of traditional personnel management by human resource management (HRM) in the nineteen eighties in the UK and the USA led to generation of voluminous research literature especially in these two countries. Gradually, this thinking reached to other locales through the benchmarking of HR practices of multinational companies (MNCs), which they spread globally at an unusual speed. These developments clashed with the well-entrenched pluralism in industrial relations (IR) that was being celebrated as a fundamental workplace value especially in the European countries. But the strategic use of HRM attacked and eroded the edifice of pluralism even where it had taken strongest possible roots. These new developments led to intensification of critical HRM literature. Around now, the debate on HRM discourse seems to have nearly concluded after being in the heat for more than two decades. The participants in this debate were mainly British scholars, but to some extent scholars from continental Europe and the USA as well. During this period came the outstanding, and perhaps the most quoted, HRM work of Karen Legge that focused on whether HRM was different from traditional personnel management. Talking of the promises of HRM and its future agenda for the pluralistic societal goals, she gave quite a dismal picture highlighting the unitarist designs of employers for securing competitive advantage at the expense of fairness in employee relations.
In the last decade or so, new themes and research questions emerged in the HRM discourse both at conceptual and empirical levels. HR outsourcing has become a flourishing industry which has further reduced the transactional role of HR departments. Call centers have now become a widespread reality. Many other new business issues emerged: talent management; exponential rise of the services especially in the private sector; fast emergence of gold-collared worker; learning organisation and knowledge management; the linkage between HRM, firm performance and business strategy; ethics, values and people management; cultural and institutional...