adopter of Taylor’s credo of scientiWc management and, more so than in England,
France, and Germany, Japanese employers strove to implement it (Merkle 1980 ;
Tsutsui 1998 ). In the 1920 s a number of individual employers and government-
sponsored business groups from Japan visited the USA speciWcally to observe
American industrial practices and they took back and adopted (with modiWca-
tions) a number of elements of the Welfare Capitalism project. An association of
academics, business managers, and government oYcials, called the Kyochokai
(Society for Harmonious Cooperation), was formed to promote improved indus-
trial relations practices, and the Wrst labor management consultants appeared
(Gordon 1985 ; Kinzley 1991 ). Japanese Wrms began to develop ILMs, created
personnel/IR departments, and started numerous HRM practices such as recruit-
ing programs, hiring tests, incentive wage plans, job evaluation programs, and shop
committees (Dore 1973 ; Hazama 1997 ;Jacoby 1991 ). These practices were also
fostered by the American corporations that had branch plants in Japan.
A notable event in the history of HRM is the world’sWrst international confer-
ence devoted to the subject. Held in Flushing, the Netherlands, in 1925 , it was titled
International Industrial Welfare (Personnel) Congress. The conference lasted
seven days and featuredWrst-hand reports on the status of the welfare/personnel
movement in twenty-two countries. The conference organizers chose to call it a
congress on ‘welfare work,’ since this title was the most common in Britain and
British colonial territories (India, South Africa, etc.), but put the word ‘personnel’
in parentheses in recognition of the shift in nomenclature in the United States.
The conference proceedings explained that the term ‘welfare work’ was used in a
broad sense to include personnel management activities, but nonetheless its
use gave emphasis to what was described as the ‘paternal and social side’ (p. 45 ).
It goes on to say that the term ‘personnel’ as used in the USA stresses that the
function is ‘recognized as part of the Management’ and that personnel is not just a
staVfunction but includes ‘anyone who supervises employees, from the assistant
foreman to the president’ (p. 46 ). Several years later the association abandoned
both the welfare and personnel terms and adopted the name ‘International Indus-
trial Relations Association’ (Kaufman 2004 a).
2.3 The Middle Period: 1930 – 1965
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
From its birth in the mid- 1910 s to the late 1920 s, the new management function
of HRM made considerable progress and was quite favorably viewed by
academic observers in the United States. Illustratively, labor economist and medi-
ator William Leiserson ( 1929 : 164 ) concluded, ‘when the contributions of personnel
the development of hrm 25