reports, for example, that the German steel company Krupp had a long-established
Personnelbu ̈ro to handle staV administration, while the French steelWrm Le
Creusot had a similar Bureau de Personnel Ouvrier. The earliest employment
department in America is reported to have been established at the B. F. Goodrich
Co. in 1906 (Eilbirt 1959 ). The movement to create a separate employment depart-
ment in AmericanWrms started to coalesce in 1912 with the formation of the Boston
Employment Managers Association. Quickly the term ‘employment management’
became the accepted descriptor for this new management function and in 1916 it
had spread widely enough to support the creation of a nationwide Employment
Managers Association.
The rise of the employment management function is tightly linked with another
seminal development—the emergence of the doctrine and practice of scientiWc
management (SM). TheWrst professional/scientiWc writings on business organiza-
tion and management appeared in the early 1880 s in the United States, authored
primarily by engineers. The engineers sought to use principles of science to increase
the eYciency of business production systems. Inevitably they were led to consider
the ‘people’ side of production, including methods of employee selection, job
assignment, supervision, work pace, and compensation. This new approach
found its most inXuential and strategic formulation in the writings of Frederick
Taylor, particularly his bookPrinciples of ScientiWc Management( 1911 ). In America,
employers’ interest in applying SM to labor management was substantially heigh-
tened by two new and much publicized empiricalWndings reported in the early to
mid- 1910 s. TheWrst was the huge cost of employee turnover (often in excess of 100
percent annually); the second was the cost savings from the recently inaugurated
industrial safety movement (Jacoby 1985 ).
The First World War had a great impact on the development of the HRM function
throughout the industrial world (Eilbirt 1959 ; Kaufman 2004 a). The major combat-
ants sought to harness their economies to maximum war production, greatly
stimulating the pressures to rationalize management and achieve higher product-
ivity. Governments in several countries sponsored research on industrial fatigue and
instituted screening tests for new recruits into the armed forces (Baritz 1960 ; Niven
1967 ). Likewise, war production led to an economic boom and dramatically higher
employee turnover rates, escalating wage pressures, and problems with discipline
and work eVort. Finally, labor unrest, strikes, and union organizing greatly
mounted—factors that, with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 , caused
widespread concern that the ‘Labor Problem’ was on the verge of boiling over into
revolution in other countries. Out of this fear was born, in turn, a new movement for
industrial democracy (Lichtenstein and Harris 1993 ). In response, companies
expanded welfare activities, created new employment departments, and in hundreds
of cases established shop committees and employee representation plans.
In the American context, two new terms for labor management quickly emerged.
TheWrst of these waspersonnel management(or personnel administration). By the
the development of hrm 21