International perspectives on human resource management context and practice

HRM Policies

Cultural Context of HRM

The hardest biases of all to overcome are those of which we are not even aware of ourselves. Our readings in human resources management and policy demonstrate this: While writers like Collin (2010) acknowledge the fact that they are writing from one specific perspective, at the same time they may not be aware of exactly how limited that perspective may be. This paper examines a number of the assumptions that come into play in establishing human resources management programs and policies in two different cultural contexts not simply as a window into two different sets of practices (although this would be interesting in and of itself) but also as a way (and this is the primary purpose within the context of this paper) to elucidate the ways in which a larger context must be consider.

The first is that outlined by Collin (2010), a perspective that she defines as applying to British firms. The second is that of the ways in which human resources management is structured and conducted in firms doing business in Hong Kong. The two sets of human resources perspectives allows to one to gain insight into the ways in which cultural and social context can be '"read" from (as well as incorporated into) human resources management policies. Such a project draws on theory from a number of different fields beyond the organizational study of businesses themselves to include anthropology, sociology, and psychology among others.

The purpose of providing an international perspective on human resources management is that such a perspective (in terms of both comparison and contrast) allows for a clearer assessment of how each of these perspectives works on its own. When one considers a human resources management strategy only in the context of a single company, a single industry, or even a single country, it can be very difficult to understand its advantages and disadvantages, the origin of its underlying assumptions, or the culturally values embedded within it.

By placing any set of practices (not only human resources management but any set of organizational practices at all) within a cross-cultural or international perspective, a writer can produce an assessment of those practices that is far more accurate and comprehensive. Such an international contextualization makes assessing human resources management (as a set of organized processes that both reflect and shape a set of complex human behaviors) far more productive.

This paper focuses on one particular pair of human resources management policies: Those of the United Kingdom and those of Hong Kong. A profitable analysis that outlined the cultural and social context of any two countries would prove to be both useful and interesting. However, this particular pairing (the author believes) proves especially educational because of the historical connections of these two nations. Hong Kong was, of course, under British control for a number of years. It now lies under the suzerainty of China, a country whose economic practices and business style lie at fundamental opposite ends of the spectrum from each other.

This said, British business traditions still influence the ways in which business is done in Hong Kong. Moreover, business practices (including human resource management) in all areas of China are changing dramatically and at almost lighting speed at the current time while British business practice (including human resources management) are remaining relatively stable -- both products of the current political and economic climates of the country involved. The differing degree of stability involved in business practices of the two countries is also important in providing a detailed cultural context. Such a cultural context can be seen more in the differences than in the similarities, although given the fact that business practices are becoming more and more similar across the world as our economies become increasingly globalized dictates that there are bound to be important similarities as well.

Cultural Context

As Collin (2010) notes, human resources management is more than just a collection of "policies, practices, procedures, and prescriptions" (p. 84) that exist as a way of determining how the relationship between employer and worker should play out. Human resources protocols help define the larger context within which people in a company work together: Human resources management is an essential and central part of the corporate culture that builds up in any given business. Human resource management also reflects larger cultural values: For example, in the United Kingdom, one of the policies that reflects larger cultural values and that also reinforces corporate values is that young children cannot be made (or allowed) to work.

Collin (2010) refers to this as the vital importance of human resource policy as being a core part of the 'philosophy of an organisation'. It follows from this that human resources management must also be seen as one of the most effective tools that a company's management possesses for helping to make public (both to employees and to external stakeholders) corporate values. Companies set human resource policies to maximize their benefits: This perceived potential benefit includes how consonant human resource values are with the overall values of the culture.

One clear example of this is how workers are treated according to gender: In a patriarchal society, women workers may be treated far less well and have far fewer options for redress than is true in a country in which cultural attitudes are on the side of gender equality and legal means exist to right sexism in the workplace. This is one aspect of human resources management that can be all-too-often overlooked because of the ways in which businesses often have ambivalent policies towards women, in part acknowledging the fact that many companies in all cultural and national contexts are not entirely clear on an internal level as to their own belief systems about the way in which gender should be negotiated in the workplace.

One of the most difficult aspects of an analysis of human resources management, Collin argues (p. 85) is that it is like water for a fish: It is very hard to find the right perspective from which to analyze it. The traditional stance for analyzing something is to stand back far enough from it to be able to get a sense of "the whole picture." This is not something that can be done in this case since we (the researchers and writers) are a part of the picture itself. We cannot get far enough back from a picture in which we are part of the framed action. There is no external pinnacle on which to perch and study and analyze the way in which the "natives" work when we ourselves are one of the natives. (Bearing in mind that the term "natives" is being used in a postmodern context here, a context that acknowledges the dismissive way in which this term has often been used in the past.)

Moreover, and this is equally important, we cannot analyze the way in which human relations management works in the ways that traditional research methods are applied to other systems because any social arena as complicated as human resources management is cannot be studies in isolation. Collin gives the example of a child who uproots a seedling to see how it is growing with the result, of course, that the seedling is no longer growing (p. 85).

Collin notes that it cannot be emphasized too strongly that while a holistic perspective (one that considers the whole picture of anything on both a conceptual and pragmatic level) may be unfamiliar as an investigatory tool or overall state of mind, it is important to practice it because it is the only tool that will allow for a proper understanding of the role of context (p. 86). The context of human resources management is "multilayered, multi-dimensional, and interwoven" (p.87), and this is the necessary foundation of any authentic examination of human resources management. And it is not possible to provide sufficient sense of context for such a multi-dimensional approach without considering the cultural context of any set of human resources management policies (Keenoy,1999a and 1999b).

Making it even more difficult to understand the full (and fully necessary) approach to contextualizing human resources policies is a growing acknowledge that all policies (both inside companies and in human society at large) can be understood as not being "real" (that is, as referring to something that exists outside of the context of human behavior and knowledge) but as the product of what scholars refer to as postmodernism.

Within the context of postmodernism, reality is constructed by "discourses," which is another way of saying that people construct reality by the ways in which they talk about the world. The more democratic a society, the more people are "allowed" to have a say in the creation of reality; the more authoritarian a worldview, the fewer the number of groups of people's discourses matter. Thus in the United Kingdom, with a very long tradition of democracy and a current culture that values egalitarianism, a number of different groups are seen as having the legitimate right to participate in company policies that determine how workers are treated.

In all post-structuralism where language is the central focus, language has been defined, "the possibilities of meaningful existence at the same time as it limits them. Through language, our sense of ourselves as distinct subjectivities constituted. Subjectivity is constituted through a myriad of what post-structuralists term discursive practices: practices of talk, text, writing, cognition, argumentation, and representation generally & #8230;. [we should consider] the ways in which discourses are implicated in relations of power

Language however, is not merely an innocent means of exchanging only ideas. But is used as a means to buttress the power relationships in a society (Jayawardena & Seneviratne, 2003 p. 9)

In Hong Kong, on the other hand, with its lack of a long tradition of democracy and in the relatively recent history of being reincorporated in a China that wishes to make it sovereignty clear, the number of voices consider to have a legitimate say is far fewer. This is one of the great challenges for firms doing business in Hong Kong: How do they convince women that they will be treated well within a context in which women have fewer legal rights in the workplace?

This presumes that firms do indeed want to treat women well and have their employees believe this to be in their best interests. As Chiu & Lee argued at the point of handover, this was one of the important financial (and thus human resources) issues that would have to be decided in Hong Kong (1997). Ye (2002) highlighted a dramatic decline in the status of Hong Kongese women after turnover, indicating that female workers in Hong Kong were being pulled down to the status of women in China rather than maintaining the status that they had had under British rule.

A Four-Stage Process

The larger cultural context of human resources management in the United Kingdom (and this is true as well of a number of other Western nations such as the United States, France, and Germany) has come about in a series of historic stages, according to Collin. The first of these was "scientific management," a philosophy based on the institution of rational work habits and culture -- a philosophy that can be seen as resulting in part as a reaction against the manorial tenor of relationships that existed in the pre-industrial world (p. 89) and was an explicit attempt to move the workplace into a mode in which personal relationships were substantially less important.

Walton (1999) describes this shift, one that occurred in England and not in China because China was not participating in the industrialization of its economy during the 19th century:

During the early part of this century in response to the division of work into small, fixed jobs for which individuals could be held accountable. The actual definition of jobs, as of acceptable standards of performance, rested on 'lowest common denominator' assumptions about workers' skill and motivation. To monitor and control effort of this assumed calibre, management organized its own responsibilities into a hierarchy of specialized roles buttressed by a top- down allocation of authority and by status symbols attached to positions in the hierarchy. (pp.16-17)

This shift from the centrality of the relationship between worker and manager/owner/supervisor/overlord to the centrality of a triadic relationship among worker, work product, and manager occurred scores of years ago in Britain and, because of this as well as because of cultural and social factors that are only indirectly related to this, such a shift never occurred as abruptly in China, even in Hong Kong.

This fact -- that the shift from agrarian and feudal economic relations -- occurred at a different pace and in a wholly different historical context in Hong Kong and the rest of China than was the case in the United Kingdom has implications not just for the ways in which the discourses of human resource programs are developed and implemented in general, but also for the ways in which firms recruit women in particular.

In the early stage of the capitalist mode of production, though female labour replaced male labour, it didn't much affect the gender stereotyping of organizations. And did not uphold feminine values in organizations. And didn't change the ownership of the managing [controlling] from men's hands to women's hands. And therefore, we argue that it merely took time for men [male labour] to adjust to these new changes; and kept it remaining that nurturing as dishonourable, ancillary-kind values. And remained 't[he] organization' as male domain by compelling women to just play men's role. And finally, putting the gender-dynamic of division of labour in feudalist system into a crisis. (Jayawardena & Seneviratne, 2003, p. 3)

Hong Kong firms, when developing human resources policies, and especially when developing those aspects of human resources policies that apply explicitly to recruitment and hiring practices, must take under advisement the ways in which past patterns of gendered work divisions and policies still obtain in the current workplace.

Human resources policies have to be set in the current context in which they are formulated and enforced; however, it is imperative for human resources managers to bear in mind at all times that a significant part of the process of providing appropriate context in both the creation and maintenance of human resources policies is that the past history of work relations in a particular culture must be acknowledged. This is one of the most helpful aspects of Collin's summarize of human resources philosophies in the United Kingdom: She makes it quite clear that each stage has been built upon the previous one and that current policy makes no sense if it is not also considered within the context of historical values.

Another factor to be considered in this area of cultural and historical context of human resources policies is that the pace of change in China today is actually more dramatic and thus more traumatic than it was for workers in the first generation of industrialization in Europe. One of the key functions of human resources policies is to reduce the trauma that outside historical and economic forces have on employees in the context of how productive they may be in their current situation (Clegg, 1998, p. 48).

The second important stage of human resources management can be labeled as the human relationship stage, a stage that reflected larger cultural concerns that dictated that individual workers have clear rights, and that one of these rights is to a job that is rewarding as possible (p. 90). The next stage in the development of human resources management concepts in the West is the approach that is generally referred to by the phrase 'human resources management' and emphasizes the importance of mutual respect and the greatest reasonable degree of flexibility in an organization. The fourth stage -- one that is essentially unrealized -- is that of a humanistic response, is a workplace in which each individual is considered to be an equal to all others, participating collaboratively in work to the extent that each person is fulfilled on a personal level (p. 90).

These differing approaches to the issues of human resources management can be seen to arise from different historical moments in British economic and financial development. As such, they are indeed very much reflective of a British point-of-view of how companies should be run and how people should interact with one another in a professional, corporate context. This view is embedded in human resources management across the industrialized West in such a way that many people are likely not even to recognize that there are other ways in which to run a company in terms of the relationships among workers and between workers and managers (Legge, 1999).