in the post- 1960 s period, including legislation regulating discrimination and equal
opportunity, pensions, treatment of disabled employees, and family medical leave.
Companies typically assigned compliance and administration of these new laws to
the personnel/HRM department, thus leading to new staVpositions and respon-
sibilities.
Also important was the ongoing decline of the union sector. Companies gained
new opportunity to switch from defensive union avoidance and a pluralist collect-
ive bargaining approach of employment management to a more proactive, uni-
tarist, and high-performance approach. Many companies, to signal this shift,
relabeled their personnel and industrial relations departments as human resources
departments. Likewise, in the USA, the Weld’s major professional group, the
American Society of Personnel Administrators (ASPA), changed its name in 1989
to Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
AWnal factor that had a large impact was the tremendous economic success
enjoyed by Japanese industry in the 1970 s– 1980 s and the widespread conviction
that a key ingredient was the Japanese HRM model built on high-performance
practices, such as participative management, extensive investment in employees,
and a mutual gain philosophy (Thurow 1992 ).
By the early to mid- 1990 s the practice and study of HRM had clearly experienced
a rejuvenation. This trend was clearly evident in universities. Student enrollment in
HRM courses was booming, business schools were hiring dozens of new HRM
professors, membership and participation in the HR Division of the Academy of
Management steadily rose, the leading management scholarly journals (e.g.Acad-
emy of Management Journal) were featuring far more HRM-related articles, and
new HRMWeld journals were born (e.g.Human Resource Management Review)or
renamed and strengthened (e.g.Human Resource Management). Adding to the
sense of resurgence was the palpable decline of the once-dominant industrial
relationsWeld and its rival approach emphasizing a social science, multidisciplinary
curriculum.
Amidst this upbeat mood arose two other developments in the 1990 s that
threatened the comfortable status quo and brought into light some long-standing
deWciencies and vulnerabilities that all the hoopla about SHRM and HPWS had
temporarily masked.
TheWrst of these developments was the return of economists and industrial
relationists to the HRMWeld. In the late 1980 s a new subWeld of labor economics
emerged, called the economics of personnel, and quickly grew in terms of partici-
pants and publishing activity. Using the tools of neoclassical microeconomics,
these economists, led by Edward Lazear, developed a wide array of sophisticated
models to explain a plethora of personnel practices, such as diVerent forms of
compensation, mandatory retirement rules, and screening models of employee
selection (Lazear 1999 ; Gunderson 2001 ). Other economists, coming from an
institutional and industrial relations perspective, have developed insightful models
the development of hrm 37