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Edward P. Lazear. Personnel Economics for Managers. New York: Wiley, 1998, 538 pages, $73.95.
Reviewed by Wayne E Cascio, Professor of Management, Graduate School of Business, University of Colorado-Denver, Denver, CO.
This is not an easy book to review. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that readers of Personnel Psychology are more likely to be familiar with the human resource management literature than with the literature in economics in general, and labor economics in particular. Every page of this book is rooted in the latter. Although the title of the book includes the term "personnel," readers may be surprised to learn that in the course of 18 chapters and over 500 pages of text, there is virtually no reference to any published work in the management literature in general, or to the human resource management literature in particular.
This is not to imply that the material in the book is not useful, or that it is of no interest to academics or practitioners of human resource management. On the contrary, it is written very clearly, and theoretical ideas are illustrated by lots of practical examples, including actual company examples. However, Lazear chooses his topics very carefully, for they are all amenable to economic analysis. Of necessity this means there are many topics that are addressed in more traditional treatments of the subject that are omitted here. Such topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
* The legal context of employment decisions-statutory and case law in the field of employment
* The analysis of work
* Human resource planning, including forecasts of labor supply and demand
Alternative methods and techniques for assessing candidates and staffing organizations-(e.g., measures of aptitude, ability, or personality, work sample tests, including assessment centers, biographical data, employment interviews) Dual-career couples and work/family issues Analysis of training and development needs, alternative methods, or approaches to training evaluation. At a general level, however, workplace training and development are considered in the context of the theory of human capital.
Performance management
Union representation and collective bargaining
Issues of ethics and procedural justice in employee...