5 CONCLUSION
East Asia has seen a surge of economic growth since the 1960s. Its cultural
background has undoubtedly played a significant role in this process. There is
a core value-system based on the combined characteristics of Confucianism,
Daoism and War Strategies which still has a strong influence on Asian HRM,
although clearly exceptions also apply.
We have also seen that the management of human resources in the Asian
economies we have selected shows both similarities and differences. While
Japan and Taiwan have relied on the ‘market’, albeit backed up by robust state
support, China and Vietnam have only recently emerged from the strait-jacket
of the ‘command economy’. And while they all shared a similar employment
model relating to collectivism, harmony, hierarchy and paternalistic manage-
ment, they differed in the detail of actual practice.
Today, they all have greater labour-market flexibility but this may vary
between the economies with stronger state support and those with less. In
China, the ‘iron rice bowl’ system is being phased out entirely as it enters an
era of greater openness in its product and factor markets, with its entry into the
World Trade Organisation. The Japanese life-time employment model is now
also under severe pressure. More performance-driven rewards systems are
adopted by the family-owned businesses in Taiwan and other overseas Chinese
economies in the South-East Asian region and they are becoming more com-
monplace in even the nominally socialist societies such as China and Vietnam.
Social security has also been weakened and is now dependent on individual
workers’ contributions added to by the employers.
While we cannot propose a full degree of convergence either between
the two sets of countries in this chapter or other countries in this book
(see Chapters 7 and 9), we can accept that there will be a degree of ‘relative
convergence’ (see Warner, 2002). The trends towards globalisation can only
strengthen these tendencies towards greater similarities in Industrial Relations
and HRM policies and practices over the coming decades, although we can
expect that each country’s apparent distinctiveness will remain visible.
6 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1 What are the underlying traditional philosophies that may be responsible for
the development of some modern HRM concepts in East Asia?
216 International Human Resource Management