Human Resource Management, 9th edition

Book Preface

This book has been evolving through many changes since the very first edition of its predecessor Personnel Management in 1979. Our objective has always been to track the development of the personnel/ human resource (HR) function and its activities. Our preface to the eighth edition in 2011 opened by saying: ‘Since the last edition the world has undergone a major recession, triggered by a banking crisis unprecedented in modern times. This has created great uncertainty about how human resource management (HRM) will be changed.’ Then, many people still assumed that it would be like other recessions, followed by a steady recovery, renewed growth and we would all feel more secure. Three years on we can be more certain of some changes that will continue for the foreseeable future:

1 Rather than becoming more secure, for most people their experience of employment will be less secure. ‘Jobs for life’ had always been rare, but security of employment in terms of an open-ended contract that would be maintained in most cases for as long as the employee wished has slowly become less. Some businesses that experience sharp variations in demand for their products, like some in electronics, are employing certain categories of staff on fixed-term contracts via a consultancy in order to avoid the costs of making people redundant. This is just one example of subcontracting instead of directly employing people. Alongside this is the great change in pension provision. Outside the public sector, final salary schemes have dwindled to a handful and the contemporary substitutes are more likely to be owned by the employee, with a reduced level of dependence on the individual employer. Some companies rise and fall with breathtaking speed. In April 2012 Google bought a British IT company for $1 billion. The company had a single product, had been in existence for little over a year and employed only thirteen people. How can a company of that size be worth $1 billion? At the same time we see sudden failures, like HMV, Sea France, Comet and Hungarian Airlines.

2 The shift towards the ‘disaggregation’ of employment in businesses has increased. In 1984 John Atkinson published a short paper with a clever illustrative figure that identified a move towards businesses having a core workforce of vital people who were well paid and built into the businesses, surrounded by a peripheral workforce, with jobs requiring skills that were not specific to the business and might be directly employed or employed via an agency or as a sole trader. This attracted great interest and hundreds of HR lecturers reckoned that they could run at least three teaching sessions on the paper! Atkinson had described a process that had been going for some time and gave it a nudge. Subcontracting of staff in catering, office cleaning and security became commonplace and retail distribution is now normally subcontracted. The development of using the Internet for marketing has seen a great increase in the number of sole traders or very small businesses providing specialist services. In the UK in 2012, 74% of private-sector businesses were sole traders without employees and 3.8 million people were working from home. The general assumption that a business is a close-knit community of people who spend most of their time in one location with an organisational culture that generates morale and meets employees’ needs to belong is no longer quite as universal as organisational studies have suggested.

3 Levels of public-sector employment will remain depressed. Together with most western economies, it has been an objective of the UK government to reduce the number of people in permanent employment in the public sector as part of an overall objective to rebalance the economy in favour of the private sector. This has only partly succeeded, as much of the cost saving has been in reducing payments to arm’s length organisations and charities providing services, rather than reducing the number on permanent contracts. Nonetheless growth of public-sector core employment seems unlikely after sustained growth over the last 60–70 years. This is not to suggest that there has been a fundamental and complete change in employment practice; rather there is a change in the mix of factors to which HRM has to adapt and this will be a continuing feature in our approach to the subject in this edition. In preparing this edition we have analysed trends, reviewed the changes, examined all the novelties before discussing these among ourselves and taken account of the comments that many people using the book have suggested.

This is to ensure that the book continues to reflect the reality of working life as it is evolving rather than how we would like it to be. We also have to ensure that the book makes sense to readers in different parts of the world, although the book remains the work of four Britons, whose work and understanding are inevitably informed by experience, research and scholarship mainly in the western world.

Apart from general updating, the main changes since the last edition are that we include a new pedagogical feature called ‘Theory into practice’ at the end of most chapters. These features are case studies or some other learning aid, as suggested by our publisher; we have removed the cases that previously closed each of the eight parts of the book. There are three fewer chapters overall through consolidation in some areas. Skills now include a section on job analysis, which had been unforgivably not featured in the last edition, despite its fundamental importance in so many aspects of HR practice.