AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR

UNDERSTANDING CROSS-NATIONAL

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Most work in comparative understanding of cross-national human resource management (HRM) suggests that outcomes are shaped either by fairly abstract individual values (the culturalist position, e.g. Boxsol 1995, Hofstede 1980), or by the crystallisation of contests of ideas held at national level by powerful actors (the implied argument of most institutionalist work, c.f. Whitley 1999). Yet in spite of the field’s reliance on ideational factors, there has been little debate on how comparative HRM uses systems of ideas- that is, observable or traceable patterns of ideational factors - in explaining cross-national differences.

With the aim of contributing to theory, this paper has analyzed the treatment of the ideational sphere in this strand of research, focusing on the work published in the last decade by leading journals in the HRM field. Our interest is in exploring both the extent to which comparative studies of the management of employment relationship have dealt with ideational factors, and how they have integrated them into the explanatory frameworks offered.

The paper is organised as follows.

first section describes the process by which papers were selected for analysis, and how ideational factors were identified.

The second section categorizes the predominant comparative methodologies found in these papers, particularly in terms of their strengths and weaknesses in addressing the ideational domain.

The third section reviews the more limited number of attempts, among our population of papers, to address

comparative issues relating to the ideational sphere more directly.

These particularly concern issues of ideas and identity, and   matters relating to the production and international transmission of contemporary ideas. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the challenges comparative HRM faces in moving towards a more adequate treatment of the ideational sphere.

Concepts and methodology

Our approach was to analyse how comparative studies of the management of the employment relationship published in leading journals over the past decade dealt with ideational factors. We intended this analysis to be systematic rather than an intuitive literature review. For the purposes of validity, it is therefore important to set out in detail our own approach and assumptions. The first issue is how we identified ideational factors. We rejected the idea of building a strong model of how ideas shape comparative HRM prior to conducting the review (a theory testing approach) in favour of an approach which allowed the findings to emerge from the data (a theory building approach). Our approach was therefore relatively inductive. This consisted of the identification of statements of assumptions, hypotheses or propositions, and conclusions, which made reference to ideational factors - by which we mean non-material factors such as ideas, ideology, norms, values, etc. - as well as processes relating to the stability of, adjustment to, or change of dominant ideas, such as legitimation. The basic question was whether, and how, research made reference to such ideational factors, in explaining cross-national differences. We concentrated on how concepts around ideational factors had been deployed in the research rather than on the terminology used. Ideational factors were seen, ex ante, as capable of being portrayed as either direct or proximate factors. That is, one might portray a national difference directly as being the result of an ideational

difference (e.g. pay gaps are larger in the USA than in Sweden because the former is a more individualistic, market-based society), or as the result of ideational factors shaping institutional differences, in turn shaping outcomes (e.g. differences in the extent and level of collective bargaining, shaped in part by historically embedded values on the autonomy of individual employers, the rights of workers, etc., shape pay gaps). In either case, what we were looking for was arguments about how and why differences in ideas at a national level might shape HR outcomes, rather than simple descriptive statements. For inclusion in our analysis, papers had to meet two criteria:

To be explicitly cross-country comparative and with national differences/similarities being either the primary, or an important secondary, focus of investigation. This led to the exclusion of a small number of papers with cross-national data where national factors were not a focus of the research. It also led to the exclusion of large parts of the literature on HRM within multinational corporations; these were retained only where they actively compared the management of HR in two or more host countries.

To be about HRM. Taking a wide definition of HRM, we included comparisons of national employment systems as well as firm/firm comparisons. Relevant theoretical and methodological papers were also retained. We included comparative studies of the management of industrial relations (IR), as we see this as part of a broad definition of HRM (Sisson 1990), but excluded (IR) papers that were not directly related to the management of the employment relationship, such as studies of trade union organisation, peak-level corporatism, macro-level employment statistics, etc.