The Routledge Companion to International Human Resource Management

Citation

Tina Miedtank (2015), "The Routledge Companion to International Human Resource Management", Personnel Review, Vol. 44 No. 6, pp. 1037-1039. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-02-2015-0046

Over the last decades, technology and globalisation have had an immense impact on the workplace. Meanwhile, global economic power has shifted away from the established advanced economies in North America, Western Europe and Japan towards developing economies in general and the BRICs in particular. This Routledge Companion to International Human Resource Management aims to anticipate the impact of these developments on international human resource management (IHRM) by focusing on current themes as well as outlining the future key directions of IHRM research for the coming decade. Notably, a special focus of this volume is to expand the classical North American and European perspective of IHRM, to a more truly international perspective.

This book is a comprehensive resource which presents an authoritative overview of the key advancements of the IHRM field. The editors have compiled an extensive volume with 32 chapters written by 56 authors from a variety of countries. The book is divided into four parts. Part One provides an overview of the different established perspectives (e.g. strategy, and cross-culture) as well as unconventional perspectives on IHRM (e.g. geography). Part Two focuses on the typical lifecycle of HRM, including recruitment, selection, training and development and compensation. Part Three focuses on the global mobility of employees and covers topics, such as work-life balance of international experts, individual and organisational decisions to move abroad and expatriate retention. The last part, Part Four, examines the contemporary issues and trends of IHRM, encompassing for instance mergers and acquisitions, global culture, offshoring and global teams.

Part One incorporates a wide range of perspectives on IHRM including more uncommon fields, such as geography. The chapters are well written and clearly state possible future research directions. Therefore, this part is not only an excellent introduction to the different perspectives but offers interesting directions for further research work.

Part Two outlines the traditional issues of international HRM. Though these are traditional themes, the chapters are written succinctly and read very well. The chapter on recruitment and selection has a strong account of future research directions. However, this chapter, as well as the chapters on compensation and benefits, global talent management and global leadership, keep a North-American perspective on the issue, while Chapter 11 admirably incorporates the emerging economies, India and China, in the performance management topic.

Part Three focuses on the unique IHRM topic of global mobility. The authors anticipate new trends of self-initiated international experts, NGO workers and new organisational development (e.g. short-term assignments). These chapters do an excellent job of outlining new developments (e.g. the distinction between organisation and individual benefits of international assignments). Interesting new areas of research are covered in the chapters on cross-cultural training, demographics, work-life balance, repatriation and expatriate adjustment and return. The chapter on types of international assignees is, overall, interesting and explicitly incorporates a practitioner’s perspective – a voice much needed but often missing in academic discussions.

Part Four puts great importance on outlining various contemporary issues in IHRM such as offshoring, (digital) global teams and corporate social responsibility. However, while some chapters in the previous parts explain the possible future directions in their themes extremely well, the chapters in Part Four do this to a lesser extent and instead the readers are confronted with a chain of research questions, leaving them without a sense of which direction the research should be moving to.

The book is a solid volume and not a manual to be read from cover to cover. The format for each chapter is almost the same; starting with a brief description of the topic, then outlining the significant developments, suggesting future research direction and ending with a short conclusion section and references. The book is easy to use and the bibliographies are certainly helpful and the overall index is beneficial.

Clearly, at around 600 pages, it is a substantial piece of work in both scope and ambition. The major strength of this companion is its exhaustive and very well written review of the different topics. Most of the authors took great care to incorporate the latest findings making it a great resource of research for newcomers and a solid reference for experts as the chapters focus on the issues that arise when organisations operate on a global level. The book allows insights that can potentially add to solving problems in HRM of multinational companies. In this way, the book is not only successful as a companion and guide to future research but it is also useful for HR practitioners, higher management level, and assigned or self-assigned international experts who want to prepare themselves to go abroad and would like to have a macro perspective on this task. There is, however, no attempt to guide the reader which sometimes leads to repetition in successive chapters and a lack of interconnectivity between the chapters. Part One leaves the reader wondering if there is an overall structure or idea behind the order of the chapters. The book would have benefited from a more clearly defined common thread in the introduction to improve the reader’s experience.

The idea of a “companion”, as this book is titled, suggests that it should accompany the reader as a frequently used resource. For researchers and PhD students, the book could have come closer to this aim if, overall, the chapters were more consistent in terms of a true international perspective and future research ideas. Some chapters lay out future research directions extremely well such as chapters in Part Three while others, in particular Part Four, simply state a chain of research questions. This is particularly disappointing as Part Four could have been especially interesting to direct the reader towards new research issues and ideas.

There are three main other books, by Dowling et al. (2013), Harzing and Pinnington (2014) and Sparrow (2009), which synthesise the field of international human resources. This reviewed companion differentiates itself by offering diverse perspectives on IHRM, beyond the common strategic, institutional and cross-cultural ones. Another unique aspect of this book is that Part Three focuses especially on mobility of employees and the current changes affecting and experienced by MNCs. Most notably, this book distinguishes itself from these other IHRM publications in the international diversity of its authors, which reflects the ambition of being a truly international HRM publication. The majority of authors do not limit their chapters to a North-American perspective on IHRM, and the volume incorporates issues resulting from the rise of emerging economies. Examples of chapters that incorporate an international and emerging economy perspective are those on economics and IHRM, performance management, compensation packages of international assignees and IHM in offshoring and managing contingent workers.

Overall, the book gives an excellent overview of, and includes many different perspectives on IHRM topics. The volume is a comprehensive resource of a wide range of key themes of IHRM, capturing a diverse discipline. For those in HRM, or researching and studying the field, this is an exciting time as the field will undergo interesting changes. This Routledge companion is a first step to anticipating the future trends that has impact on IHRM. Therefore, I recommend the book. It can be helpful not only to (research) students but also researchers and experts of HRM, employment relations and strategic management and it is suitable for libraries of business schools and universities.