The purpose of this chapter is to compare and contrast current HRM strategies
and practices in four East Asia economies, namely Japan, Taiwan, China and
Vietnam. The rationale of such selection and classification is based on the
following considerations: (1) we want to cover the diversity of HRM strategies and
practices in this region; (2) we want to explore the interplay between cultural
factors and political, economic and historical influences that affect HRM. The
four cases have similar traditional philosophical roots, but political, economic
and historical factors set them apart. We distinguish two groups of countries.
The first group includes Japan and Taiwan and represents capitalist industri-
alised economies. China and Vietnam are selected to represent a different type
of society, namely a socialist market economy. Generally speaking, the four
cases represent different stages of economic development, ideological orienta-
tion, maturity of managerial and market knowledge but share a similar tradi-
tional philosophical foundation.
This chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the traditional
philosophical thinking and illustrates the underlying cultural factors that may
be responsible for the development of their unique HRM approaches; Section
3 illustrates the HRM strategies and practices in Japan and Taiwan, while
Section 4 does the same for China and Vietnam. Finally Section 5 concludes
the chapter by highlighting the expectations for the future and the contribu-
tion for managerial thinking.
2 TRADITIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL THINKING
AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
Generally speaking, traditional philosophical thinking in East Asia is rooted in
ancient China thousands of years ago. During the period of Spring Autumn
Warring States (770–221 BC), many different philosophical schools emerged in
an age when old social rules (early Zhou dynasty 11th century – 771 BC) were
collapsing and the search was on for new systems of thought to explain the
resulting chaos (McGreal, 1995: 62). This era was named the ‘contention of a
hundred schools of thought’ (Chu, 1995). Three major domains dominated tra-
ditional thinking and are relevant to management: Confucianism, Daoism,
and War Strategies. One of the characteristics of Chinese thinking is that it does
not divide the search for knowledge into separate and rigid categories with a
separate set of principles governing each domain. Different philosophies
benefit from each other and efforts to combine philosophical approaches are
common. A typical example of such efforts can be found in War Strategy and
later Neo-Confucianism (AD1130–1200).
196 International Human Resource Management