journal,Personnel Psychology. According to Brown and Myers ( 1956 : 89 ) coming out
of human relations research was ‘a pervasive belief in the existence of a positive
correlation between the degree of ‘‘morale,’’ ‘‘job satisfaction,’’ or ‘‘loyalty,’’ on the
one hand, and the productive eYciency of the enterprise on the other hand.’ These
were the key variables that personnel management in the 1950 s was enlisted to
promote.
The 1950 s also saw the high water mark in union density and collective bargain-
ing. The most popular title for the corporate HRM function in large companies,
particularly in the union sector, was ‘industrial relations.’ The industrial relations
department was typically divided, in turn, into the labor relations (collective
bargaining) section and personnel (employment) section (Heneman and Turnbull
1952 : p. iii).The idea that industrial relations should be practiced in a strategic
manner,Wrst articulated in the 1920 s, was not lost on writers in the 1950 s. Econo-
mist E. Wight Bakke, for example, wrote on this theme in an article aptly titled
‘From Tactics to Strategy in Industrial Relations’ ( 1948 ), while the practitioner-
orientedPersonnel Handbook(Mee 1951 : 3 , emphasis in original) counsels readers
on theWrst page, ‘the detailed work of employee testing, of job evaluation, or other
day-to-day personnel operations is of little valueunless these activities are welded
together in a carefully planned, well-integrated, eYcient, and eVective programto
help achieve the objectives of the business.’ But given the importance of union–
management relations at the time, the strategic focus in HRM was most often
oriented toward unions and collective bargaining (Kochan and Cappelli 1984 ).
However, as union density began to recede in the late 1950 s and collective
bargaining became routinized, resources and programs began to move back toward
the personnel part of the HRM function (Jacoby 1985 ). In non-union companies,
the HRM function was sometimes called personnel and sometimes industrial
relations, but the primary focus at the strategic level was union prevention and
maintaining a stable, motivated workforce. Personnel departments in the top tier
of progressive non-union corporations tended to be inXuential players, given that
these companies developed highly structured internal labor markets and gave great
emphasis to maintaining employee morale and job satisfaction (Foulkes 1980 ;
Jacoby 1997 ). At the large bulk of American companies, however, the personnel
department typically had little contact with strategic business and employment
policy and instead focused on tactical administration of various personnel activ-
ities. Often the personnel function was regarded as one of the lowest rungs in the
management hierarchy and a place for low-level administrators and clerks. For
example, Peter Drucker ( 1954 : 275 ) characterized personnel as ‘partly aWle clerk’s
job, partly a housekeeping job, partly a social worker’s job and partly ‘‘Wre-Wghting’’
to head oVunion trouble or to settle it.’ Twenty years later, Foulkes ( 1975 : 74 ) noted
that only 150 of the Harvard Business School’s 39 , 000 graduates were employed in a
personnel position. He explained this anomaly by noting, ‘Many of them [the
graduates] feel the personnelWeld is ‘‘low status’’ and ‘‘bad news’’.’
the development of hrm 29