Human resource management in smaller firms: A contradiction in terms?

Human resource management came into popular parlance in the late 1970s. as a managerial approach aimed at re-ordering the employment relationship to ensure employee efforts were strategically focused on achieving organisational performance and competitiveness in increasingly volatile markets. Since then there has been much consideration of whether HRM is a robust academic concept supporting a particular managerialist ideology, a status enhancing label for people managers, or a practitioner tool kit. There has also been a consideration of how HRM is articulated in small and entrepreneurial firms. This paper suggests that the concept of HRM is, in most instances, uncertainly theorised and, therefore, how it, whatever ‘it’ is, might be identified in such firms is challenging. Unless HRM is theorised in context with more care, there is a danger of it remaining a ‘fuzzy concept’ encouraging abstract empiricism which, rather than clarifying our understanding, only further muddies already muddy waters. In pursuit of this argument, in this paper current debates about the notion of HRM are considered as is how these fit with what is known about the management of labour in small firms. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to question how appropriate it is to talk about HRM as an approach to managing labour in small firms.