4 - Embedded Bedfellows: Industrial Relations and (Analytical) Human Resource Management

Summary

Introduction

Human resource management (HRM), as a field of study, has evolved since its entry onto a 1980s’ ‘enterprise culture’ that prized ideological individualism and hard business performance (Guest, 1990). In this chapter, we argue that HRM can have three uses: ‘as a field of study’, addressing factors influencing how people are managed; as a specific model delivering firmlevel ‘competitive advantage’, for example, high-commitment management (HCM) or high-performance work systems (HPWS); or as a ‘normative perspective’, for example, searching for best practice or best-fit human resource (HR) arrangements. We suggest that approaching HRM ‘as a field of study’ reflects a more eclectic and pluralist approach concerned with external contextual forces, as well as internal social relationship dynamics (see Boxall and Purcell, 2016; Dundon et al, 2022).

Within the realm of work and employment, ‘human resource management’ threatened to supplant the nomenclature of ‘industrial relations’ (IR), which has rather different epistemological and ontological underpinnings (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2003). With the decline of institutional IR (Purcell, 1993), contemporary HRM was seen by some to fill gaps in the coverage of modern working life shaped by the emergent ‘enterprise culture’ of the 1980s. While there were some battles in the 1980s and into the early 1990s around the distinctions between personnel management (PM) and HRM (Guest, 1987), or whether HRM and IR had arrived at an accommodation of some common ground related to issues of work and employment, by the new millennium, there was an altogether different threat to both IR and HRM in terms of the intellectual space from a growing psychologization of the subject area (Godard, 2014; Kaufman, 2020; Barry and Wilkinson, 2021).

While being seen as part of a US neoliberal and hyper-individualistic agenda, HRM has evolved, at least in the UK, to reflect a variety of approaches, with each of which seeking to understand the tensions and issues affecting people in work and employment. We acknowledge that this HRM mix can be seen much more in the likes of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand than in North America, where HRM has been seen more as applied psychology and IR is often seen as a branch of labour economics (Kaufman, 2014).