(Legge 2005 ; Marchington and Grugulis 2000 ). Broad policies are always open to
the interpretations of managers, both general and specialist, and sometimes their
active subversion. Furthermore, particular patterns of HRM are laid down or
‘sedimented’ (cf. Giddens 1979 ) at certain critical moments in an organization’s
history (Poole 1986 ) and managersWnd themselves working within these traditions
without necessarily being able to explain how all the pieces got here. Goals may not
be seriously analyzed unless some kind of crisis emerges in theWrm’s growth or
performance that forces reconsideration and restructuring (e.g. Colling 1995 ; Snape
et al. 1993 ). Our task, then, is better understood as trying to infer the general
intentions of labor management, recognizing that we are studying a complex,
collective process, built up historically inWrms and inevitably subject to a degree
of interpretation, politicking, and inconsistent practice.
This chapter examines a range of frameworks, theories, and research contribu-
tions that throw some light on the goals of HRM. As a business school discipline,
much of the literature in HRM is normative, designed to support management
education and thus setting out an argument about what managersshoulddo or,
more modestly, oVering an analytical framework to assist practitioners to shape
their own policy prescriptions. Fortunately, it also contains studies that test the
predictions of theoretical models and thus provide a descriptive picture of what
employersactuallydo. The chapter reviews both normative and empirical contri-
butions within the HRM canon but its prime objective is to outline what we know
about the goals of HRM in practice and what needs further research.
The chapter treats HRM as a broad, generic term equivalent to ‘labor manage-
ment’ (Boxall and Purcell 2003 ; Gospel 1992 ). This deWnition needs to be con-
trasted with two others. First, it diVers from the school of thought that sees HRM
as a high-commitment model of labor management (e.g. Guest 1987 ; Storey 1995 ),
one in which employers invest heavily in employees to secure high motivation and
low labor turnover. Such models exist but employer styles are actually much more
diverse (e.g. Katz 2005 ; Marchington and Parker 1990 ; Purcell and Ahlstrand 1994 ;
Rubery and Grimshaw 2003 ) and the goal of this chapter is to understand why.
Second, the deWnition used here diVers from the school that sees HRM as an anti-
union employer strategy, as a form of union substitution, or as attack on the
collective institutions of industrial relations (e.g. Barbash 1987 ). Given the fact that
the rise of HRM has correlated with a major decline in private-sector union density
in Anglo-American countries, this reading is understandable, but it is again too
restrictive, as we shall see.
While the literature referenced in this chapter is mainly drawn from HRM, use is
also made of key sources in the industrial relations and labor economics literatures
which contain some important theory and studies on the goals of employers.
Although ideological perspectives and scholarly methods vary across these discip-
lines, one thing unites the various works cited: they share an assumption thatWrms
do not employ people for ‘the sheer hell of it.’ They assume an underpinning
the goals of hrm 49