systems in Table 9.1 should also be challenged within the context of ‘developing’
countries. It is to this that we now turn.
4 CHALLENGING THE CONCEPT OF HRM IN
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
The perception of management in ‘developing countries’, created by the
conceptualization presented above, is summarized under the heading ‘post-colo-
nial’ in Table 9.1. The resulting profile is not useful when directly contrasted with
management in the ‘developed’ world, however much it may reflect the realities
of many organizations operating in Africa, India, and other post-colonial regions.
Yet this is a perception that is often employed by Western multinational compa-
nies operating in developing countries, and is accepted by indigenous managers
often through the influence of their own management education in Western-
style programmes and institutions. This pejorative view – of an inefficiently
bureaucratic, authoritarian and relationship-driven system – if accepted, leads to
only one logical solution: the introduction of ‘modern’ management – a Western
style, results-driven, customer focused, and ‘participative’ and accountable HRM.
Such a conclusion may not only affect organizations in the private sector
in ‘developing’ countries, but also those in the public sector, state owned enter-
prises and those recently privatized enterprises which are in the process of refo-
cusing as a result of downsizing and other major organizational change (in fact
this prescription to introduce modern Western management is often a condi-
tion of World Bank/IMF led structural adjustment programmes in both the
developing world and former Soviet bloc countries: e.g. Barratt Brown, 1995;
Glenny, 1993). If one accepts the developing–developed world paradigm this is
wholly appropriate, and represents the inevitable march towards ‘moderniza-
tion’ or emulation of the successful ‘developed’ world.
However, in order to understand the pitfalls of this approach it is necessary
to understand the cultural boundedness of the concept of human resource
management by making a distinction between the two very different cultural
perceptions of the value that is placed on a human being in different cultural
settings: instrumentaland humanistic(Figure 9.2).
The cultural perception of human beings as a resource used in the pursuit
of shareholder value may be challenged by a perception of people as having a
value in their own right (Jackson, 1999). Hence, a developmental approach
towards people, as an integral part of the organization, and as a direction of its
objectives, may be implicit within, for example, Japanese approaches to man-
aging people (Allinson, 1993). There has been an increasing emphasis in
Western literature on the stakeholder approach to managing organizations,
and a hard instrumental approach has already been challenged in a limited
HRM in Developing Countries 231