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Anne Mills: Buckinghamshire University College, Buckinghamshire, UK
Introduction"
A great territory of unanswered questions and unresolved contradictions, a region of half-demands which until now have enjoyed as little realisation as proposals counter to them, and which seem products of visionary caprice because they aim at something whole, something new and enormous (Bruno Bauer, 1854)."
As the events of the past eight years have unfolded in central Europe it would appear that the comments of Bauer are as valid now as they were when another great wave of revolutions engulfed central Europe in 1848. Even today, the elusiveness of this "visionary caprice" remains an enigma to many external observer. Although the raising of the "iron curtain" has presented researchers with many opportunities to study communism and its aftermath, the focus of this research study, of which this paper is the first stage, is to consider the emerging philosophies and paradigms underpinning the management of human resources within enterprises in the Czech Republic. The first phase of this project is to identify existing models of HRM as a possible starting-point for the analysis of the situation in the Czech Republic. Based on a macro analysis of the transformation process within the framework of a stakeholder analysis, some predictions concerning the emerging nature of HRM in the Czech Republic will be formulated.
The second phase of the project will comprise a study of selected enterprises within the Czech Republic to test the predictions formulated in the first phase of the study. It is also envisaged that, in the longer term, both the methodology and findings of the research will form the basis of wider comparative studies in other countries of central and eastern Europe, primarily the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Hungary.
Conceptual issues
Subsumed within this study and indeed most international studies of management is the universalist prescriptive approach, versus the more pragmatic, situationally based perspective on approaches to managing people. Within an international context, one can argue, strongly based on the Hofstede studies (Hofstede, 1991) and other research on comparative national cultures (Trompenaars, 1993), that the latter view is that which is the more credible in terms of internationally based management research. It is this perspective which will be adopted as the starting-point for the...