Product Description

Building on the success of the first edition, Christopher Mabey and Graeme Salaman are joined by John Storey in producing an even more comprehensive and thoroughly revised textbook.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #353279 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

From the Back Cover
Building on the success of the first edition, Christopher Mabey and Graeme Salaman are joined by John Storey in producing an even more comprehensive and thoroughly revised textbook.

This volume engages with the essential themes and emergent ideas in strategic human resource management. There is increasing self–confidence about the potential benefit of intangible assets, notably human resources, contributing to the success of organizations. This revised text examines such claims in considerable depth and draws conclusions about the role of strategic HRM at the dawn of the new millennium.

A distinctive strength of this volume is that it is a Set Book for one of the largest MBA programmes in Europe. It is a benchmark text for all advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level students of HRM, personnel management and change management.

Human Resource Management: A Strategic Introduction covers the following areas:

• SHRM: A New Way of Managing?


• Managing Performance


• Managing Structures and Employment Relationships


• Managing Learning


• Managing Change


• Managing Meaning

About the Author
Christopher Mabey is a senior lecturer and Head of the centre for Human Resources and Change Management at the Open Business School. A Chartered Occupational Psychologist, he researches, writes and consults widely on individual and organizational development.

Graeme Salaman is Reader in Sociology in the Social Science faculty of the Open University. He has published extensively over many years in the sociology of work and organizations, and in human resource strategies.

John Storey is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Loughborough University Business School. He is the author of three previous books including the highly successful New Perspectives on Human Resource Management.

Excerpted from Human Resource Management by Christopher Mabey, Graeme Salaman, John Storey. Copyright © 1996. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Learning Objectives After reading this introductory chapter you will be more aware of what Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) is and of the variety of current developments which may constitute SHRM in practice. Discussions of definitions can be tiresome and appear indulgent or unnecessary. But in this case they are crucial. The term SHRM has been used in a number of different ways to mean a variety of very different things. We need to be clear about the ways people are using the expression if we are to explore if it is happening in practice or indeed if it is possible to achieve it in practice. Chapters 3-16 present and discuss a comprehensive wealth of research findings, generalization and analyses with respect to the purpose and content of discrete specific SHRM initiatives in different areas. They offer research materials on the occurrence and impact of SHRM. But for these to make sense, and to contribute incrementally to an overall understanding of what SHRM is, and its impact and implications, it is necessary that you are able to locate these more detailed analyses in the context of a broad overview of SHRM, its background, origins and key features. By the end of this chapter you will also be aware of where SHRM came from and so understand the intellectual and practical origins of SHRM theory and practice. As a result you will be able to make informed, and when necessary, critical and questioning analyses of SHRM ideas and recommendations. By enabling you to understand the nature, origins and implications of SHRM the chapter will equip you to recognize some of the tensions and questions that surround SHRM projects. Specifically you will: * Recognize the types of current organizational changes that are widely seen as indicative of SHRM. * Be able to recognize the extent to which these changes do or do not constitute SHRM-type change. * Know what SHRM is, in its various forms. This chapter identifies some of the key ideas inherent in SHRM approaches. The following chapter explores variations in types of, or definitions of, SHRM. * Be aware of the background to SHRM and its underlying ideas. The ideas are not new yet there is something distinctive about SHRM, not simply as a set of practices, but as a body of ideas and associations, powerfully packaged and influential in their implications. Introduction This book is intended both to be descriptive of SHRM and its key constituent ideas and to be analytical of the approach and its ideas. It will present, describe, analyse and critique. It is intended that the reader leaves the volume not only better informed about what SHRM is, but better able to evaluate SHRM and to understand it. These goals require us to consider the concept or approach of SHRM carefully and critically; not to tear it apart for the sake of it, but to assess how robust and impressive it is in terms of its constituent ideas and assumptions. This activity however, which starts in this chapter, is not easy. This is partly because SHRM is an 'elusive target, characterised by a diversity of meanings and ambiguous conceptual status' (Hales 1994: 51) Therefore we must spend some time looking at how SHRM has been defined and how it has been employed. But this is also difficult because SHRM may be not only diverse and ambiguous, it may also be contradictory - it may contain elements, or depend on assumptions, which are themselves inconsistent, pulling in different directions. If this is the case it is important to identify and isolate these contrary impulses. Adam Smith, whose celebration of the nature and role of the market in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 inspires today's executives and politicians, once remarked that, 'The pretence that corporations are necessary for the better government of the trade, is without any foundation' (Smith 1937:129). Is it then the case that there is an essential opposition between protecting managers' 'right to manage' in pursuit of maximum profitability, and the sorts of organizational structures, employee relations and job design principles associated with SHRM? Is SHRM possible within a market place which is inherently cyclical and chaotic? Part of the answer to these questions depends on how SHRM is defined. From the chapters in Part I it will be apparent there is no single entity of SHRM, but a variety of different definitions and approaches. Furthermore, SHRM as an approach has much in common with other approaches to organizational restructuring, such as a focus on internal marketing (see Hales 1994). Because of the variety and complexity of approaches to SHRM, it is important to have some understanding of how SHRM is defined and used. It might seem that a discussion of the nature and merits and provenance of the ideas and assumptions inherent in approaches to organizational restructuring such as SHRM is simply academic. After all if it works, why worry? But, as we shall see, it isn't easy to know whether or not it is working; and anyway what do we mean by working? Working for whom, over what time-scale? And even if SHRM is working (by whatever measure) what costs are involved, and what costs are we prepared to pay, or to suffer? (We return to these questions in chapter 18.) And if SHRM is not working or is working partially and incompletely, is this because it is not being implemented properly or because the constituent ideas or even the basic approach itself is flawed?