divorce of IR and HRM was a divorce between labor economists and scholars from
management and the behavioral sciences.
Up to the 1950 s in the USA, economics was regarded as the foundation discipline
of business education, per the statement of Craig ( 1923 : 36 ) that ‘Business has
always been recognized as a branch of the subject of economics.’ Thus, personnel
management was widely regarded as ‘applied labor economics’ and through the
1950 s many of the most recognized authorities on personnel, and authors of leading
personnel texts, were labor economists (broadly deWned) and industrial relations
specialists (Kaufman 2000 b, 2002 ). These economists, such as Heneman, Myers,
Strauss, and Yoder, were aYliated with industrial relations and tended to empha-
size the macro (‘external’), governance, and strategic dimensions of HRM, typically
with an emphasis on labor markets and labor relations. But by the late 1950 s these
people were either retiring from academe or moving away from HRM to other
topics, while the new generation of neoclassical labor economists had little interest
in management.
As the economists exited, the HRMWeld became increasingly the preserve of
scholars from management and the behavioral sciences. Naturally, their interests in
employment had a more organizational (‘internal’) and psychological orientation
and were centered on subjects such as organizational design and control, leadership
styles, eVective management principles, and the psychological and social aspects of
human interactions in the workplace. In the 1950 s this group of researchers, such as
Arensberg, Argyris, McGregor, and Whyte, was most often aYliated with the
human relations movement, not HRM per se. In the early 1960 s human relations
was absorbed in the newWeld of organizational behavior (OB), and its oVshoot
organizational development (OD), and most of the leading behavioral scientists in
management and business schools became active in it (Wren 2005 ). The net result
was that the HRMWeld in the 1960 s—largely perceived at this point as personnel
management—was left in a rather marginalized position. On one side, the econo-
mists and IR scholars drifted away, while on the other the behavioral scientists
and management scholars gave their time and attention to the newWeld of OB.
Both groups looked down on PM as a largely a-theoretic subject dealing with
a collection of largely disconnected administrative procedures and employment
tools (Mahoney and Deckop 1986 ). Tangible evidence in support of this verdict is
provided in the volumeClassics in Personnel Management(Patten 1979 ). The
articles in it illustrate the intellectual dominance of OB, the absence of economists,
and the depressingly low-level administrative nature of PM.
From this low point theWeld of HRM embarked on a slow but cumulatively
signiWcant upward movement in intellectual substance, vigor, and participation in
the academic world. To a large degree, the status of HRM in the practical world of
industry mirrored this trajectory.
The term ‘human resource management’Wrst appeared in the textbook literature
in the mid- 1960 s in the USA (Strauss 2001 ). The inspiration for the term appears to
the development of hrm 33