Personnel Management : A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice (3rd ed.)

Citation

Beardwell, I. (2000), "Personnel Management : A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice (3rd ed.)", Employee Relations, Vol. 22 No. 5, pp. 523-527. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2000.22.5.523.2

For over a decade now, since the appearance of the first edition in 1989 and its sibling edition in 1994, this text has occupied a central role in the discussion, analysis and dissemination of critical themes in personnel management. During this time a lively and expanding market in texts which address human resource management (HRM) has emerged. How far does this text compare with this new and insatiable demand for relevant and comprehensible knowledge in the area?

Some subtle shifts may be noted in the titling of each edition. Personnel Management in the first edition was described simply as “in Britain”, while the second edition used the term “A comprehensive guide to theory and practice in Britain”; this edition drops the British appellation. Despite this, the general treatment remains that of personnel management as it is researched, taught and experienced in a British context. What is remarkable about the text is the continuity in content over time. With slight changes the broad sections covering organisational structures, resourcing, development, reward and relations all reappear, albeit with either new or different combinations of existing authors. What this provides is a unique insight into the shifting patterns of analysis and practice across the life of the three editions: this is best exemplified by the opening editorial chapter.

The opening section of the two previous texts stood as an independent overture to the main body of the opera and addressed some of the underlying themes of personnel management as an area of active analysis. Thus in 1989 the themes were “prescription”, “labour process”, “variety in practice” and “the legacy of history”; in 1994 the emphasis was directed fairly emphatically on HRM and the extent to which it was realistically reshaping the role of personnel. In 2000 this chapter has been integrated into the first section on the organisational context of personnel management and the debate has returned to look at both prescriptive and industrial relations approaches, along with HRM, “redesign”, “ambiguity”, “business structures and strategies” and the impact of Europe. What the chapter provides, once again, is a comprehensive and acute account of the tensions and contradictions of a function, and an area of academic endeavour, which is critical to the success of organisations of all types. The two supporting chapters by Karen Legge and Trevor Colling on personnel management in, respectively, lean and extended organisations are models of analysis of how the function is working in the “new” forms of organisational structure that have developed over the past 15 years.

The composition of the second section, on resourcing, covers planning (Liffe), recruitment and selection (Newell and Shackleton) and equality (Dickens); appraisal, previously in this section, has now been subsumed into a chapter elsewhere (by Bach) and no longer features as an indexed entry per se. The third section deals with development; worth mention are the two chapters on the Learning Organisation (Keep and Rainbird) and Managing Careers (Newell). Both are strong additions to this area, to run alongside the established strength of management development (Storey and Tate). The former have shifted the focus of the two previous contributions away from the perennial UK training debate to consider, in some depth, the implications of both the learning organisation and the learning society, placing training into a rich and reflective context. The latter has taken a topic of some contemporary popularity and subjected it to a thorough examination which demonstrates, once again, that both organisations and managements need to make much deeper and longer commitments to investment in time and resources for the concept to become meaningful operationally.

The fourth and fifth sections on reward and relations contain persistent themes allied to new variants of established arguments. Bach’s chapter addresses the issue of performance and argues that performance appraisal has to be seen in the light of performance management. The inherent weaknesses of a managerially dominated appraisal interview are self‐evident; developing a performance management model implies “a more nuanced approach”. Kessler continues with the theme of reward systems and strategies developed in the second edition, and Arrowsmith and Sisson introduce Managing Working Time as distinct from the second edition contribution on Working Hours from Blyton. The fourth section displays some reordering, with discipline (Edwards) now located alongside participation (Marchington and Wilkinson) and social partnership (Tailby and Winchester). The latter use some case examples to explore another popular theme; perhaps inevitably the conclusions as to the likely outcome of partnership, the representation gap and the effects of union recognition legislation are tentative.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the book overall? As already noted, the current subtitle of the text is as a comprehensive guide to theory and practice of personnel; however it does not purport to be a source of reference for the practitioner who is seeking an operational answer to a pressing problem. Rather, it is a source of contemporary research and analysis that will be used by academics, students, policy advisers and strategists who need to explore well researched issues in some depth and use the text to supply further routes for their own work. In that respect it is invaluable as an intellectual source book for personnel management in Britain and, taking the three editions together, one can construct a terrain that tells us how both the policy and the analysis of the subject have developed here. If there is a significant implicit theme in this edition which marks it out from its predecessors (for this reviewer at least) it is in the increasingly active role of managers in managing processes that were once handled passively and administratively. If it is correct to have arrived at that conclusion, then that tells us something about the way in which personnel in Britain has taken on a much more embedded role within management – in contrast, perhaps, to its historical role alongside management. In this sense the book is also telling us something about management in Britain more widely or, at least, that part of management which is attempting to come to terms with the implications and challenges of trying to ally personnel management with organisational performance. This book helps substantially to contribute to that process; the coda is provided by the editors themselves who, in describing how different approaches to the study of personnel management have contributed to each other, arrive at this judgement: “The upshot is an increasingly rich body of knowledge and understanding”" As for the approaches, so for the book.