American approach to HRM was slowly taking hold in Europe due to the
substantial transfer of management methods to Europe initiated under the
Marshall Plan and then carried forward through the 1950 s sponsored by American
foundations and the American government. Many American business people and
academics traveled to Europe as members of productivity mission teams and for
sponsored consulting and teaching, while numerous Europeans came to the USA
for professional management training at universities and companies.
Shifting attention to the status of HRM in universities, a distinctly mixed picture
emerges. Outside of the USA, HRM received little attention in either research or
teaching, most particularly with respect to the personnel management part of the
subject. Malm notes, for example, that ‘Relatively little material on ‘‘personnel
management’’ is included in the curricula of universities in Europe, or even in
technical institutes or graduate schools of business and economics’ ( 1960 : 78 ). One
reason for this situation is that in many European countries, such as Germany, the
employment relationship was (and still is) heavily regulated by labor law, making
legal education more important than management education for personnel
directors. A partial exception to this situation existed in Great Britain. Universities
gave very modest attention to personnel management per se, but signiWcant
vocational training was provided by technical schools and professional groups,
such as the Institute of Personnel Management (Chartered Institute of Personnel
and Development 2005 ). Also, relative to other European countries universities in
Britain provided greater teaching and research in human relations and industrial
relations (and, correspondingly, relatively little in labor law, reXecting the light
degree of legal regulation of employment in Britain). Industrial relations, however,
was typically deWned narrowly in Britain to include only labor–management
(union) relations, although starting in the mid- 1960 s the subject of management
began to garner more attention (Gospel 1992 ; Kaufman 2004 a).
The 1945 – 65 period in the USA was a boom time for HRM broadly deWned, but a
relatively stagnant time for personnel management per se. Into the 1950 s the term
‘industrial relations’ continued to be deWned broadly in America to include all
aspects of employment, including personnel. Prior to the Second World War only a
handful of universities had formal programs in industrial relations; after the war
several dozen new industrial relations centers and institutes were established
(Kaufman 2004 a). The impetus for these new programs came foremost from the
dramatic spread of unionism and the pressing problems of collective bargaining,
dispute resolution, and contract administration. But also important was the
swelling interest in industrial human relations and its applications to management
and organization design. These new industrial relations programs greatly expanded
teaching and research in the HRM area and drew thousands of students to the
subject. The programs were multidisciplinary, had a social science orientation, and
sometimes were housed in business schools but more often were established as
free-standing units in the university (in order to ensure impartiality between labor
the development of hrm 31