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Human resource management has become a major component of business schools and is quickly becoming a dominant focus of management research (Kaufman 1993; Lewin, 1991; Storey 1992). It has almost universally displaced personnel, and in many schools is threatening to supplant industrial relations and organizational behavior. Of late, articles in British and Canadian journals are beginning to question what human resource management is and what impact its nonnative prescriptions will have on unions, workers, and employment relationships 0.e., Barkin, 1989; Blyton & Turnbull, 1992; Guest, 1987; Godard, 1991; Ichniowski, Delaney, & Lewin, 1989).
These articles frequently note -- few attempt to resolve -- the definitional fog that surrounds the term "human resource management" Sadly, efforts at defining human resource management (HRM) are grounded on current descriptions of HRM and do not attempt b resolve the issue by tracing the term's history. There has been little success in clarifying the definition of HRM, in identifying its boundaries, or in distinguishing it from related disciplines. The histories of these related disciplines have been occasionally discussed (for example, Baron, Dobbin, and Jennings (1986) and Ling (1965) for personnel management, Jacoby (1985) and Wren 1987) for American management theory, and Kaufman (1993) and Adams (1993) for industrial relations), however, the history of human resource management has not.
This paper very briefly traces the origins and development of human resource management through a review of books and articles. It begins with a brief exploration of the three original uses of the term "human resource management" or i variants-two of which have been completely ignored--and then follows the development of the main families of definitions of HRM found in the literature.
This paper observes that HRM exists in multiple versions, reflecting the disciplinary and ideological orientations of each versions' adherents. The lack of an effort to resolve the definitional opacity surrounding HRM may be responsible for the strong growth of the discipline. Human resource management's lack of specificity and its strong institutional position within business schools, a product of its popularity as a practitioner's philosophy, may allow academics to pursue a wide variety of research interest, while legitimating these pursuits by calling them HRM.
COINING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Drucker and the "Human Resource"
The term "human resource" was coined by management...