Strategy and Human Resource Management

Strategy and Human Resource Management is concerned with examining how HR strategy impacts on an organisation’s chances of survival and its relative success, and with understanding how it varies across important organisational, industry and societal contexts. It takes an analytical approach, which examines and explains what managers do and why they do it before offering any sort of prescription for what the authors think they should do. This approach is grounded in research but is brought to life with examples, cases and vignettes to offer a practice-orientated analysis of the subject. As well as explaining important general principles in strategic HRM, critical features of the different contexts in which they are applied are examined.

For this fifth edition, there is increased coverage of contemporary topics, including capital markets and increasing financialisation, Industry 4.0, the shaping of employee voice under different varieties of capitalism and the effects of austerity. Strategy and Human Resource Management retains, however, the classic sources that are fundamental to the subject while also including important theoretical advances and the best new studies of strategies in the world of work and people.

Peter Boxall is Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand. His work on strategic HRM and employee well-being has appeared in a variety of international journals.

John Purcell is Visiting Professor at the Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick, UK.