The impact of human resource management practices on managerial work: Institutional constraints, strategic actions and organizational outcomes

Abstract

The article asks what the main consequences have been for managerial work arising from changes to human resource management (HRM) practices during an era of neoliberal corporate restructuring. The authors answer this by making two contributions: (a) theorizing a range of HRM and organizational practices emerging in different socio-economic contexts, and (b) presenting qualitative empirical evidence on changes to managerial work associated with these practices across economies. For the former the authors analyse divergent and convergent human resources trends in relation to national contexts, drawing on wider debates on Varieties of Capitalism (VoC). For the latter, they examine implications for HRM and managerial work arising from firms introducing new organizational forms in Japan, the UK, the US and Brazil. Contending that HRM practices have commonly been researched within a contextual vacuum, the authors develop a position that moves ‘beyond the enterprise’ to explain HRM in ways situated within wider organizational, economic and political domains.