HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

Human Resources Management

Human Resources Management

In its broadest sense, human resource management is a widely used term coined to encapsulate management policies and practices concerned with the supply and utilization of the labor resource required for the firm to meet its commercial objectives. To do so, the employer has to be able to compete within the labor market and meet basic requirements of social legitimacy relevant to the society in which the firm is located. The employer needs to be able to attract and keep labor and ensure that labor power is utilized for productive purposes relevant to its business objectives. It is by no means certain how best to proceed in this endeavor. This uncertainty in the context of inevitable resource constraints—whether financial, cognitive, or the capacity for control—make both the meaning and practice of human resource management difficult and ambiguous.

Conceptual Overview

Human resource management as a new label for the personnel function and as a descriptive term for labor policies was developed in the United States in the early 1980s. The work of Harvard academics was especially influential, as seen in the book by Michael Beer, Bert Spector, Paul Lawrence, D. Quinn Mills, and Richard Walton. The usage of the term spread rapidly in the Anglo-American world and beyond. At the same time, it attracted widespread criticism for its excessive managerialism and seeming exclusive concern with the management prerogative and the achievement of shareholder value to the neglect of other stakeholders. The critical question then, as now, is whether human resource management was a new approach to labor management or merely a new label on an old bottle. This relabeling of the personnel function is itself of interest, since it reveals one of the conceptual problems with the term and points to the long-running difficulty of the role and influence of the function. Criticism of professional personnel managers and departments for their lack of influence and inability to make meaningful contributions to the achievement of strategic objectives has been long running. The rapid spread of the nomenclature human resource management for professional labor managers and their departments can be seen as an attempt to gain legitimacy and respect from senior executives by downplaying the welfare image of personnel management and giving emphasis to the contribution to business strategy. By the early years of the 21st century the term business partner was widely adopted although not universally accepted.

Human Resource Management as a Distinctive Approach to Labor Management

Leaving aside the problem of human resource management as the function, the other substantial, and long-running, debate is whether human resource management means a distinctive approach to labor management—a new way of managing labor—or whether it is a generic term covering all the many approaches adopted by employers to meet their needs for viability and, for some, competitive advantage, within the economic, social, and regulatory environment under which they operate. There is a great advantage in defining human resource managements a distinctive approach to labor management since we can ask what it is; what type of, or “bundle” of, policies are commonly used; how it is different from previous approaches; and what the outcome effects are both in terms of firm performance and employee well-being.

The distinctive approach discussed here has both led to, and been influenced by, interest in ...