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The development of strategic HRM: reflections on

a 30-year journey

Peter Boxall

To cite this article: Peter Boxall (2018) The development of strategic HRM: reflections on a 30-
year journey, Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 28:1,
21-30, DOI: 10.1080/10301763.2018.1427423

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LABOUR AND INDUSTRY, 2018
VOL. 28, NO. 1, 21–30
https://doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2018.1427423

ARTICLE

The development of strategic HRM: reflections on a 30-year

journey
Peter Boxall
Department of Management and International Business, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Approximately 30 years since my paper with Peter Dowling on Received 4 December 2017
‘Human Resource Management and the Industrial Relations Accepted 10 January 2018
Tradition’ was published in Labour and Industry, this paper reflects KEYWORD
on how the academic literature on Human Resource Management Strategic HRM
(HRM), particularly strategic HRM, has developed. Starting with a
reprise of the claims in the original article, it offers an overview of
the state of the field and concludes that there is a mixed report card
for the last 30 years. There is clearly a need to more carefully theorise
the economic motives of the firm and to understand the history and
variety of employer behaviour in its diverse context. Hard work
continues to be required in integrating theories from different dis-
ciplines and academics need to be open to research methods
beyond their own personal preference. However, strategic HRM has
become a more balanced subject, which embraces both sides of the
employment relationship: employee well-being and organisational
performance. While improving the rigour of our research methods is
going to be important in the next 30 years, research in strategic HRM
should also focus on making a better contribution to societal debates
about the opportunities and problems of employment relations.

Introduction: HRM and the IR tradition: a reprise

It is now nearly 30 years since my paper with Peter Dowling on ‘Human Resource
Management and the Industrial Relations Tradition’ was published in Labour and Industry.
At the time, Peter was supervising my PhD thesis, one of the first to be undertaken using
theory in strategic Human Resource Management (HRM). In the paper, which I delivered at
the 1990 conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and
New Zealand at the University of Melbourne, we reflected on the arrival of the HRM
phenomenon. The HRM literature was new, but growing fast, and the paper was our
attempt to review the literature, seeking to understand what HRM was offering and how
it might differ from, or add value to, the theory and research on Industrial Relations (IR). The
session was well attended and it was clear that IR academics wanted to see if the HRM
literature was worth taking seriously. Hadn’t the personnel management literature been a
practice-obsessed flop, lacking theoretical heft and societal relevance?

CONTACT Peter Boxall p.boxall@auckland.ac.nz

This article was originally published with error. This version has been amended. Please see Erratum (https://doi.org/10.
1080/10301763.2018.1438828)
© 2018 AIRAANZ
22 P. BOXALL

The paper identified four themes in what it called ‘the dominant American paradigm’ of
HRM. This included the emphasis of writers on taking an ‘investment’ or development-
oriented approach to employing people, and the growth of the ‘strategic approach’, which
set out theories of how HRM related to the organisation’s strategy and its wider context. It
also pointed to a growing ‘integration of HRM with general management’, rather than a
specialist dominance, and to an enterprise-level focus in the US literature. Commenting on
the US literature, we saw the ‘marriage of strategic management with HRM’ as creating ‘the
potential for a more vigorous theoretical debate than was ever witnessed in the personnel
management literature’ (Boxall and Dowling 1990, 201).
We then reviewed the British critique of the HRM phenomenon. British academics were
engaging critically with the new development. This was partly because leading British IR
academics, such as John Purcell (1983) and Keith Sisson and Terry Sullivan (1987), had
been arguing that the study of management was under-done in the IR literature and that
it was time we undertook more research on what management was doing and how we
should understand it. The British critique addressed the definitional confusion in HRM (is it
one kind of approach to labour management or a generic term?) and debated whether, in
practice, it represented an unwelcome international expansion of anti-unionism. Taking a
different angle, those working on the British skills’ debate asked whether HRM repre-
sented a critique of management for decades of under-investment in the workforce.
We went on to offer our view of the definitional questions, arguing that ‘the concepts of
employee development and strategic management go to the heart of what is meant by
HRM’ and that HRM, as a new academic discipline, should be ‘regarded as complementary to
the study of industrial relations’ (Boxall and Dowling 1990, 204). We argued that it should
not be seen as uniformly anti-union or as resting on unitarist assumptions. We pointed out
that you could not form either of these views if you took the Harvard framework seriously
(Beer et al. 1984). What HRM offered was ‘theory and research on management as an actor,
enterprise-level phenomena and direct management-employee relations’ (210). We saw it
as drawing on ideas in both Organisational Behaviour (OB) and Industrial Relations and
integrating them with the new theory in Strategic Management. This was a criticism of the
weakness in the IR literature on the theory of management (although we recognised that
this was changing). However, we also made it clear that the Industrial Relations tradition was
much stronger in analysing links across multiple levels of analysis, including those involving
management–union relations and the relations of the various employment parties with the
state. We saw education for a life in HRM as needing an underpinning in the study of OB and
IR and their antecedents in the more fundamental social sciences.
At the end of the talk, we may have succeeded in convincing some people that they
should go away and read at least some of the new texts. We are guessing that popular
choices would have been the sources that helped IR academics engage more fully with
strategic management theory (which, like HRM, was then burgeoning) and with sources
in the British critique of HRM.
In 1990, we were both parents of young children, who are now grown up and have
made us grandparents. What about HRM, where we dedicated most of the rest of our
academic lives? How has it turned out?
 LABOUR AND INDUSTRY 23

Reflections on how HRM, particularly strategic HRM, has developed

First of all, a personal confession. I still see HRM as complementary to Industrial (now,
more commonly, Employment) Relations but I fairly quickly changed my view that HRM
should be defined as an inherently development-oriented approach. It became apparent
to me that the academic study of HRM would develop much better if we understood
HRM as embracing a wide range of models, with varying levels of investment in people.
Through the Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management (Boxall et al. 2007) and
through successive editions of Strategy and Human Resource Management (Boxall and
Purcell 2003/2008/2011/2016), I have advocated for an ‘analytical approach’ to HRM: one
in which we aim to understand what managers do in HRM, why they do it, how they go
about it and who benefits from it.
These questions are relevant across the three major, but overlapping, branches of
HRM (Boxall et al. 2007). The micro-HRM branch incorporates a long tradition of research
focused on the efficacy of individual HR practices, such as those associated with
recruitment, selection, training and development, pay, employee voice and so on.
A second major branch is concerned with international HRM, which addresses how
HRM changes in the internationalisation process, including how cross-cultural and
institutional factors affect the choices made by international managers (e.g. Harzing
and Van Ruysseveldt 2004; Brewster et al. 2016). Now retired, after a long and distin-
guished career, this was the primary focus of Peter Dowling’s work, including super-
vising 17 PhDs to completion, transforming Human Resource Management Australia into
the Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources and co-authoring six editions of his influen-
tial text (for the most recent of these, see Dowling et al. 2017). The third branch is
concerned with strategic HRM, that is with the role of HRM in the strategic management
of the firm, including how patterns of HRM are shaped and how they affect organisa-
tional outcomes. My principal interest has been in developing the third branch, and this
has led not only to identifying some general principles of strategic HRM but also to
delineating how models of HRM vary extensively within and across diverse contexts and
make variable impacts on outcomes.
Where have we come over the last 30 years? Can we pass a healthy academic
examination? I had to face this question in a keynote speech at the 2013 European
Conference of the International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) in
Amsterdam (subsequently published in the Journal of Industrial Relations; Boxall 2014).
There I argued that the record so far is mixed. Like most academic disciplines, strategic
HRM has grown up with a blend of strengths and weaknesses. Like everything in the
wide field of business and economics, there is now an enormous literature of varying
quality, with some good trends in it while other habits and features pose ongoing issues
and challenges (for a comprehensive overview of the HRM literature, see Markoulli et al.
2017). I agreed with Bruce Kaufman (2010a, 2010b, 2012) that much (but not all) of the
US research on strategic HRM has misunderstood the role that economic factors play in
management choices, leading to the inappropriate prescription that more HR practices
will create better business performance (Kaufman and Miller 2011).
Kaufman (2012, 13) recognises, however, that the international literature on strategic
HRM has done a better job of understanding HRM in its ‘broader economic, social and
political context’. This is not surprising given that many of us are well aware of the
24 P. BOXALL

limited diffusion of ‘high-performing’ HR practices and underline the societal embedd-

edness of HRM (e.g. Boselie 2010; Brewster and Mayrhofer 2012; Paauwe 2004). There is
a wide variety of models of HRM (a typology of the broad types can be found in Boxall
and Purcell 2003/20082011/2016, 278–84). In my view, a good study of any HR practice
or system starts from asking: how much of this do we see in reality and where? What
accounts for its prevalence, or its rarity, and what affects its implementation (see e.g.
Boxall and Winterton 2015)?
We have, in fact, always had academics working in HRM who have taken context
seriously (see e.g. Jackson and Schuler 1995) and there is a lot of context-delineated
research in the field of international HRM, as regularly illustrated in the leading texts
(Brewster et al. 2016; Dowling et al. 2017). In terms of rigorously assessing claims for the
benefits of ‘more HRM’, we now have studies that I would cite as effectively bringing
contextual factors into the analysis. Here, I would mention work by Michie and Sheehan
(2005), whose careful construction of measures helps to show that it is the British firms
adopting a ‘high-road’ approach to innovation or quality that gain from a high level of
investment in employees. Similar studies of the strategy–HRM–performance nexus
which show strong contingent effects include Chênevert and Tremblay’s (2009) and
Chadwick et al.’s (2013) analyses of Canadian firms. For me, Delery and Roumpi (2017,
15) sum up the situation well in the following words:

The idea that ‘more HRM’, as Kaufman and Miller (2011) frame it, leads to better perfor-
mance is certainly not what SHRM researchers have advocated, even if it appears to be what
they have measured. The idea is that higher firm performance is achieved by having the
appropriate system of HRM practices for the firm’s particular strategic context.

To make greater progress in this stream of research, it is fair to say that we need to deal with
some methodological bad habits and weaknesses, which, as Stephen Wood (1999) argues,
affect what we can safely conclude. For example, we are still counting HR practices to
produce an index for an HR system, as if all elements included in the system are ‘equivalent’,
‘interchangeable’ and ‘independent’ (Jackson et al. 2014, 29). Adding up HR practices
overlooks the huge range of variability in how they are understood, implemented and
combined in organisations. Clearly, we need better ways of measuring models of HRM.
I argued in my speech to ILERA that Kaufman’s (2012) critique is targeted at wrong-
headed answers to the question: ‘how does HRM vary with its context and, in particular,
what is the role of economic variables in the choices that managers make?’ But I then
posed two other questions for the examination paper on strategic HRM: ‘how can HRM
help firms to build and defend competitive advantages?’ and ‘how can the “black box”
of HRM be made to work better and who benefits if it does?’
The first of these questions is one that we signalled in our paper in Labour and
Industry in 1990. Where are we on this? A key development of the last 30 years has been
the incorporation of the resource-based view of the firm (e.g. Barney 1991) and the
literature on dynamic capabilities (e.g. Teece 2011), which focuses on how firms can
build competitive advantages through internal resources that help them perform well in
their environment. Beginning with a key paper by Wright et al. (1994), this perspective
took off in the strategic HRM literature in the 1990s. In every edition of Strategy and
Human Resource Management, we make an effort to review this body of work. To
summarise a complex area, key lines of enquiry involve looking at (a) how managers
 LABOUR AND INDUSTRY 25

can build better alignment with workers who have the skills and potential their organi-
sation needs and looking at (b) how they can combine the abilities of diverse individuals
and groups in ways that are hard for others to copy, short of buying the firm itself. The
growth of interest in ‘talent management’ is an offspring of this line of enquiry (for a
recent review, see Thunnissen et al. 2013) and questions of how social capital is
developed and protected some into play (e.g. Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall 2005).
These ‘how’ questions raise complex, multidisciplinary issues that we need to address. A
key part of this challenge, as Kaufman (2016, 388) argues, is that we need to take proper
account of ‘the fundamental roles of markets, competition and profit-making’ and not
minimise or misconstrue them. That said, and it is important to say it, the engagement in
strategic HRM with the resource-based view and with its offshoot in the theory of
dynamic capabilities is an important development on which we continue to build.
This leads naturally to my third question for the examination paper on strategic HRM:
how can the ‘black box’ of HRM be made to work better and who benefits if it does? On
this human-oriented question, the psychologists among us have been leading the
charge. Studies bringing the worker perspective into HRM have grown enormously
over the last 15–20 years. A landmark paper, written by David Guest in 1999, ‘Human
resource management – the workers’ verdict’, heralded the trend and challenged radical
interpretations of how HRM was experienced by workers.
Studies of the impacts of HRM across a range of well-being outcomes – psychological,
physical and social – have now proliferated (for a recent review, see Peccei et al. 2013).
Here, HRM academics are drawing inspiration from the more fundamental social sciences,
as they should, building on frameworks such as the demand–control–support model, the
job demands–resources model and self-determination theory, among several others [to
cite just three illustrations of the growth of well-being research in HRM, see recent studies
by Marescaux et al. (2013), Soane et al. (2013) and Van De Voorde et al. (2016)].
Associated with this trend, there has been a widespread acknowledgement that we
do not understand the HRM process unless we have studied what workers think of it
(e.g. Geare et al. 2006), including the diverse attributions they may make about manage-
ment intentions (Nishii et al. 2008). This is not to say that economics is irrelevant in
understanding the nuanced questions that lie inside the black box (see e.g. the ‘insider
econometrics’ of Frick et al. 2013). However, where psychological theory and methods
are making their mark is in the process of looking behind the veil of practices: how is a
set of policies being interpreted and enacted by managers and how do employees
perceive what managers are doing in terms of their needs? This is the key emphasis in
the process approach that has gained momentum since influential papers by Purcell
(1999) and Bowen and Ostroff (2004).
The move towards well-being that is increasingly prevalent in strategic HRM is help-
ing to balance the initial concern around how HRM affects performance. Much more
work is needed to integrate our analysis of the two variables, each with their own
complexities, but we are now clearly embracing a dual agenda around well-being and
performance at work (Boxall et al. 2016). In a recent paper, David Guest (2017) urges the
field on, arguing that well-being and a positive employment relationship need to
become the central priority in academic HRM. As he observes, there are several sig-
nificant threats to employee well-being in contemporary employment relations, includ-
ing work intensification, increasing technological control, growing income inequality
26 P. BOXALL

and the increase in precarious employment. We need, as Guest (2017) acknowledges, to

recognise the wider economic and political forces shaping these trends, which have
been emphasised in labour process and critical analysis (e.g. Thompson 2003; Godard
2004). A clear and comprehensive recognition of these realities is, for me, the essential
foundation of analytical HRM. What should then follow, for those who see HRM as
capable of making a difference, is a process of identifying what can be done to improve
mutuality in employment relationships (Boxall 2013).
Our potential, in my view, is to push on beyond the individual and organisational levels
of analysis and bring the dual agenda to the societal level: as, in fact, was envisaged in the
Harvard framework of HRM (Beer et al. 1984; Beer et al. 2015). This should draw on
research in Industrial/Employment Relations, and various others, without caring about
the silos of academe, as Townsend and Wilkinson (2014) argue. For example, we can turn
our attention to the various types of wasted human potential in our societies (Boxall
2014). One of these is the problem of ‘learning traps’: situations in which the skills of
workers are underutilised and their personal development is restrained at a sub-optimal
plateau, creating job dissatisfaction and a higher propensity to quit (Boxall 2013).
Untapped potential can work to the detriment of both parties. While human performance
may be perfectly satisfactory in the short run, the learning needed to foster innovation
and higher quality is very hard to achieve with a workforce suffering from skill atrophy.
Across a range of traditions, research argues that the process of reversing skill under-
utilisation depends on creating greater scope for worker control: these are ‘high-
involvement’ work systems, a more descriptive term than ‘high-performance work sys-
tems’ (e.g. Lawler 1986; Vandenberg et al. 1999). Forms of work organisation that offer
workers greater opportunity for involvement in decision-making create the conditions for
greater use of their skills and stronger learning (e.g. Felstead et al. 2010).
The high-involvement strategy for work reform is one major pathway for reducing
socially undesirable waste in human resource management but there are others.
Another is to do with retaining the working commitment of older workers, who are
often prematurely lost to the workforce, raising the costs to society of their retirement
and contributing to social isolation and health deterioration (Sanders et al. 2011). Yet
another is how we deal with problems of overutilisation where the wear and tear of
working life undermines other parts of the life. As is well known, work intensification has
the potential to generate fatigue, creating a feeling of being wasted by work and
robbing the individual of the energy they need to develop in other ways (e.g.
Halbesleben et al. 2009; Boxall and Macky 2014). It is important to understand, as
Guest (2017) argues, how we can enhance performance without the detrimental impacts
of work intensification.
These are simply three illustrations of how we might apply strategic HRM at the
societal level. The general point I am making is that the dual focus of strategic HRM
on performance and well-being has the potential to make the subject more relevant
to societal issues and debates. This needs to include a critique of how bad ideas in
HRM, or good ideas taken to an unhealthy extreme, can play a damaging role in
society (Nienhueser 2013). One example concerns how performance-related pay,
when badly designed and implemented, can cause widespread societal damage
(Boxall 2014). Another concerns the way in which ‘exclusive’ approaches to talent
management, which only focus on a restricted group of high achievers, can cause
 LABOUR AND INDUSTRY 27

harm at the societal level, as Thunnissen et al. (2013) argue. At this level of analysis,
questions of conflicting interests among individuals, organisations and societies come
naturally to the fore. Trends that we observe in management behaviour at the
organisational level may, at this level, be harmful for society – and the discipline of
strategic HRM should say so.

Final thoughts
In summary, there is a mixed report card for the last 30 years. There is, as Kaufman (2012)
argues, a need to more carefully theorise the economic motives of the firm and to
understand the history and variety of employer behaviour in its diverse context. For me,
this is part of the ongoing challenge of integrating ideas from the different disciplines that
meet in the intersection of strategic HRM. For example, as Delery and Roumpi (2017) have
recently argued, we need to make much better progress on integrating the human capital
approach, which has grown in the strategy literature, with the research in strategic HRM,
including understanding much more about the dynamics of labour markets. This is hard
work because more reading is required – and more wrestling with concepts that are
unfamiliar or challenging to us (Kaufman 2016) – but we need to do it.
The easy way out is to retreat into the comfort of our academic discipline and, within
it, our favourite perspective and research method. This narrowing of focus is often
reinforced by journal editors and reviewers and by the fracturing of academic societies.
It is all-too-frequently drummed into PhD students. With the enormous proliferation of
conference streams and journals, this does bring publication but it does not do much for
integration. In an integrative discipline, what we need is the openness to draw on a rich
range of theoretical insights and a healthy range of research methods, both quantitative
and qualitative (Guest 2011; Boxall et al. 2016; Findlay and Thompson 2017).
For me, overall, the trend is positive. Warts and all, strategic HRM has become a more
balanced subject because it is embracing both sides of the employment relationship:
employee well-being and organisational performance. This trend is well-grounded, not
fragile. As to the future, while improving the rigour of our research methods is going to be
important in the next 30 years, we should spend equal energy on the pursuit of relevance.
In this way, research in strategic HRM will make a better contribution to society.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Peter Boxall is a Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of Auckland Business
School, New Zealand. His research is concerned with strategic HRM and with worker well-being.
28 P. BOXALL

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