ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique

Article Critique

Introduction

This paper presents a critique to the article, titled, “HRM Best Practices and Transfers to the Asia-Pacific Region”. This article is written by a team of authors and was published as a article critique in one of the best seller books of all time. The aim of this chapter is to examine if there are best practices in HRM that can be transferable to Asia and whether this indicates convergence in HRM. Key HRM practices and policies of employment, rewards, and development will be used to examine these issues (Becker, Gerhart, 2006). The structure of the rest of the chapter follows. The next section introduces the theoretical debates associated with the possible reasons for transfer, what has been transferred, and how it has happened. The chapter then provides methods to examine the transfer issue and a basis for comparison across countries, along with some general applications and comparisons. Finally, the chapter draws together the propositions and outlines some possible future directions.

According to the authors of the article, Contemporary human resource management occurs in a world that is much different from that which existed only a relatively short time ago. A leading development in this regard is the change in employment contracting, specifically, from permanent or continuous employment to employability. During the 40-year period dating from the end of World War II to about the mid-1980s, the majority of employees worked continuously for the companies that employed them, were covered by pension plans, and received a stream of pension benefits once they retired from employment with those companies (Becker, Gerhart, 2006). Under this arrangement, employees were paid less than the value of their productivity early on and more than the value of their productivity later on, with employers gaining an economic rent during the former period and employees gaining an economic rent during the latter period. At virtually any point during this period of continuous or permanent employment, therefore, one party had an obligation to the other party. These obligations were generally not put in writing, however, which is why this arrangement is referred to as implicit employment contracting (Lewin & Mitchell, 1995, pp. 194-196). These contracts, it should be noted, applied largely to male employees who in a more traditional era were regarded as the breadwinners—the sole breadwinners—for their families.

The idea of best practices can be traced back for some considerable time. For instance, Taylor's (1911) earlier “scientific management” implied that there was “one best way” of managing. We can recall, as do Boxall and Purcell (2003), that studies of individual best practices within the major HR categories of selection, training, and appraisal have a very long tradition, such as when much effort was put into improving selection practices for officers and training for production workers during both World Wars. In the 1960s, best practice would have been taken as those associated with an American model (Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison, & Meyers, 1962) and in the 1980s, a Japanese one (Oliver & Wilkinson, ...