Strategic human resource management

Abstract

This book is intended both to be descriptive of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) and its key constituent ideas and to be analytical of the approach and its ideas. 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. This approach requires 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, may not be all that easy. This is partly because SHRM is an elusive target, characterized by a diversity of meanings and ambiguous conceptual status (Hales 1994:54). 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.

Furthermore, SHRM as an approach has much in common with other approaches to organizational restructuring, such as a focus on internal marketing (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.