International and Comparative Human Resource Management

International and Comparative Human Resource Management

International and comparative human resource management (HRM) are related but distinct areas of enquiry. Comparative HRM is largely concerned with questions about why and to what extent there are differences in HR practices across countries. International HRM is more focused on issues associated with the management of employees across national borders in multinational corporations (MNCs). IHRM has therefore been interested in questions about the extent to which multinational companies reproduce similar sets of HR practices across their subsidiaries. Do they, for example, try to reproduce similar practices across all of their subsidiaries or do they adjust their HR practices to host country patterns? By contrast comparative HRM has been traditionally concerned with the description of, and (more recently) the explanation of, the differences and similarities between the HR practices thought to be distinctive of different national contexts. While each tradition has reasonably distinctive origins – in the study of MNCs and their management of expatriates in one case, and in the study of comparative industrial relations in the other – we argue that the distinction is becoming increasingly artificial and unhelpful. In particular we argue that International HRM needs to incorporate the insights of comparative HRM and international political economy so that it can move beyond its traditional focus on expatriate management.

The traditional narrowness and lack of theoretical sophistication in comparative and international HRM scholarship is well documented in the literature (see Kochan et al., 1992; Clarke et al., 1999; Schuler et al., 2002; Ferner, this volume). As Clarke et al. (1999) note to the extent that comparative studies have traditionally sought to go beyond describing HR practices across countries, and explain similarities and differences, [Page 116]they have tended to attribute differences to national culture. The IHRM literature, on the other hand, has traditionally focused on the management of expatriate managers within multinationals (Schuler et al., 2002). Again IHRM studies have often sought to explain differences in HR practices within MNCs with reference to Hofstede's widely critiqued model of national culture (Hofstede, 1984).1

While mainstream international and comparative HR scholarship has increasingly focused on the links between business strategy and HRM (see DeCierietal., 2007), a growing body of work informed by institutionalist theory has emerged over the last decade. This institutionalist literature has transformed both comparative and international human resource scholarship. Not only has institutionalism provided a theoretical basis for explaining why HR practices might differ from one country to another but it has also contributed to the study of HRM in MNCs. Macro-institutional theories have provided the basis for a reconceptualisation of the home and host country effects that shape MNCs' HR policies and practices (Edwards and Kurivilla, 2005). More recently, scholars working in this tradition have supplemented macro-institutionalism with micro-institutionalism in organisational theory to explore how differences in power relationships between corporate headquarters and subsidiaries shape the diffusion of HR policies and practices within MNCs (see, for example, Ferner and Tempel, 2006).

This chapter critically assesses the institutionalist turn in comparative and international human resource scholarship. While the institutionalist literature provides a theoretical foundation for both comparative and international HRM scholarship and has produced some important insights, there are a number of criticisms of institutionalism which suggest that the institutionalist turn may be limited. In particular, the macro institutional theories which inform much contemporary comparative and international human resource management scholarship have been criticised as static, deterministic, and prone to exaggerate the homogeneity of outcomes within institutional fields and to have difficulty accounting for change in institutional arrangements. These features can, in turn, be attributed to the tendency of institutionalist arguments to downplay the significance of non-institutional variables in shaping political and economic outcomes. While these criticisms relate to institutionalism in general, we argue that they are particularly significant when the objects of study are corporations that operate across national borders.

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