International Human Resource Management (BFT 205)

International human resource management in retrospect and prospect Over the past 20 years both organisations and academics have increasingly explored the ways in which HRM is strategic to business success and, while there have been debates over the meaning of HRM since the term emerged in the mid-1980s, it has become the most influential term referring to the activities of management in the employment relationship (Boxall and Purcell, 2003).Previously published in: Employee Relations, Volume 26, Number 6, 2004

Human resources are one of the most central strategic assets in the consultancy industry, ensuring competitive advantage and organizational success. Due to this important issue, access to hr-related information is relatively restricted. This book presents insider reports from high-profile international consultancies which allow practitioners, scholars and graduates to gain an authentic insight into the people management in business consulting. Additionally to the overview of existing hr systems, the book provides details of practices dealing with issues such as value oriented corporate culture, gender diversity management, employability, leadership development, knowledge management and employer branding.

This chapter presents an overview of developments in the field of human resource management (HRM), the structure of the book Human Resource Management in Developing Countries and introduces each of the chapters. The main issue which occupied academics in the 1980s was the evolution of HRM. In this regard, the debate was mainly on the exploration of the salient aspects of the transformation of personnel management into HRM. While some seminal HRM research findings have been produced in recent years, research has often been based on a single country or the researchers look at issues in Western Europe or North America. Investigators have identified how important contingency variables such as the size, age, nature, life cycle stage of an organisation, level of technology used and presence of formal human resource (HR) department can influence HR practices. Most of the contributors are natives of the country whose HRM practices they discuss. In chapter two Malcolm Warner highlights how over a period of five decades or so, the People's Republic of China has emerged as an economic power. Chapter three details the dynamics of HRM in South Korea. Here, Won-Woo Park discusses the miraculous economic development in South Korea over the past thirty years and how South Korea has managed to tackle the problems emanating from the recent Asian economic crisis. In chapter eight Monir Tayeb discusses the dynamics of HRM in Iran. The final chapter summarises issues related to HRM in developing countries.

The understanding of entrepreneurship owes a lot to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School of economics. In Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and business models others. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. Despite Schumpeter's early 20th-century contributions, the traditional microeconomic theory of economics has had little room for entrepreneurs in their theoretical frameworks (instead assuming that resources would find each other through a price system).