What is human resource management?

Abstract

In the last ten years, in both the UK and USA, the vocabulary for managing the employment relationship has undergone a change. ‘Personnel management’ has increasingly given way to ‘human resource management’ (HRM) or, better still to ‘strategic human resource management’. Nor is this shift exclusively confined to those followers of fashion, the commercial management consultants. It may be charted first in the writings of US academics and managers (for example, Tichy et al., 1982; Fombrun et al., 1984; Beer et al., 1985; Walton and Lawrence, 1985; Foulkes, 1986). Quickly, however, the term was taken up by both UK managers (for example, Armstrong, 1987; Fowler, 1987) and UK academics (for example, Hendry and Pettigrew, 1986; Guest, 1987; Miller, 1987; Storey, 1987; Torrington and Hall, 1987). By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s the floodgates were open. Although both the WIRS 3 survey of 1990 and the second Warwick Company Level survey of 1992 reported that only a small minority of personnel specialists have ‘human resource’ in their titles (Millward et al., 1991, p. 29; Marginson et al., 1993, Table 4.1) this was not evident from the media.

HRM … It’s a posh way of describing a personnel manager … but it goes a bit farther than that.

(A caller to BBC Radio 4’s Call Nick Ross phone-in (15 October 1991) describing his occupation)