 In this topic, we are going to discuss a very interesting aspect of culture and human resource management. We are going to talk about the concept of human resource management in different cultures and how the concept of human resource management has been affected by various different cultures and what is the history of that. We usually talk about what is the influence of culture in human resource practices. But we have not generally seen in literature that how human resource management has evolved from your culture and what its cultural meaning is. So that is what we are going to explore in this topic. So human resource management very much interestingly is also a social construct. We call it human resource management socially. We call it human resource management by the way people are managed, their policies and procedures. We call it human resource management. But this is basically a social construct. It is not a tangible construct. One organization manages its procedures and policies in a completely different way. It is also called human resource management. So it is very much interesting. It is not a concrete concept. It is a social construct. And it is not totally independent from the cultural values of the people who invented it. So obviously concepts they are defined, conceptualized and coined by people. We define the concepts ourselves. We explore them ourselves. So the people who define a particular concept, invent that term, what are their cultural backgrounds and what are their cultural values and importance. That also needs to be seen that their cultural values, they have defined human resource management in this particular way. Does everybody else take human resource management in the same way? That is something that we need to look at. Human resource management as you know that it came into being in the United States. It came into being from the literature and management practices of the United States. And it came from their business system and as a response to the foreign competition. Human resource management used to be called personnel management. And personnel management that was basically considered by calculating the pace and compensation of the personnel which was working in the organization. And it was not considered to be the management of a resource. It was considered to be management of a cost which was the personnel cost. But then the change in paradigm shift took place in America regarding managing this aspect of the organization. And from cost to resource it was considered to be a resource and called human resource. And that was how human resource management that came into being. And therefore the concept of human resource management as it is written in the literature and as it is written in the books. It is something which bears all the hallmarks of the American managerial priorities. It is opposed to basically opposed to trade unions and collective bargaining. The concept of human resource management was introduced because the American organizations they were getting increasingly affected and influenced by their trade unions. By the collective bargaining. Employees used to strike together. Trade unions used to pressurize management to give us our rights. And that was a response to this particular influence and effect of trade unions that human resource management was evolved. We will satisfy our employees from the inside of the organization. And they will be given a due share. They will be satisfied that they will not go to the site of trade union and collective bargaining. So this was the basic concept of evolving and coining human resource management. So in the American model of human resource management it would allow decentralization and human employee empowerment and participation. And that would eliminate the need to act as the employees agents in collective bargaining. So that is why you see that in the human resource literature there is a lot of importance that is given to employee empowerment, participative leadership styles. A lot of importance is given to decentralization, to de-layering of the organization, to flatter organizational structures. That is so that the employees they feel that they are participating in the organizational decision making and they don't have to go towards the trade unions and collective bargaining. That is how the concept of human resource management it was invented in the Americas. From the Americas the concept of human resource management then it traveled to Europe and in other father countries then it was also introduced in other countries. But it shows that as human resource management is considered in the Americas and the basic principles of human resource management which are considered the important values, they have not really taken roots in the rest of the world. They have not really taken roots in Europe and what to talk of other countries. They are particularly not adopted by developing countries which have a widely diverse political system, social structures and business priorities and preferences. So the American model of human resource management that actually, for example, if you look at the selection aspect of recruitment, you can see that they are basically defined by the job specifications and merit policy and all that. But if you look at the cultural developing countries including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, even China was a developing country a few years ago and the emerging economies of the Far East, they had a culture of personal context, they had a culture of social status, they had a culture of personal relationship in conducting human resources. They have not always been done on the basis of the defined set human resource principles or policies. There are many references of personal context and they are concerned about obliging other people. For example, in Indonesia, this is a culture that people who are at higher places, they are requested and obliged to accommodate their family members and it is something which is considered as a cultural norm. Similarly in Pakistan, it is considered as a cultural norm that people try to adjust their friends and colleagues and close relationships in places where they are. And it is considered to be a social norm although when we are writing about it, when we are talking in literature about it, we do not acknowledge it but it is a cultural norm. So it has not been particularly adopted in the developing countries. A study was conducted on various different cities, countries of Europe to understand how human resource management was taken in those particular countries and it was found that there was little convergence of how human resource management was adopted by various different countries because their national culture, it affected how they managed their human resources. For example, in Spain, there was little discussion of human resource management because Spain was going through a financial and economic crisis and there were problems of redundancies and unemployment. So when there is unemployment, where will the bargaining power come from? The jobs they will get, the jobs they will get, they will do their job descriptions. They really cannot go for the human resource practices of satisfying the employee for this particular project. Then it was found that Sweden's strong collectivist culture, it counters the development of a more individualistic orientation to employment relations. Again, Sweden, that is also a country where collectivist culture is their people. They help each other, they support each other, they back each other. So in an individualistic environment where only you are concerned with your own compensation and reward and promotions, that is a different thing. But in a collectivistic culture, you need to take care of people who are related to you. So because of that, you cannot actually implement that individualistic culture and that is why human resource management in Sweden, it counters the basic values of HRM. Then in another country, the Dutch feminine culture, it encourages the antipathy of Dutch employees to the hard HRM. So in the Dutch culture, because it is a feminist culture, it is a feminine culture, not a feminist culture, that is a totally different thing. It is a feminine culture which values love, nurturing, helping, supporting each other. So they don't look at the hard side of the human resource management, they do things in a congenial environment, in an amicable environment, in doing things they consider giving and nurturing others is more important. Then in Germany, it was found that institutional factors in Germany of the strong role of the unions and the formal consultative structures, they also attenuate the rise of the managerial prerogative. So in Germany, there are already structures which provide grievance redressal and that is why the management prerogative that is kind of sidelined. Then in France, the power of the patronaut hinders the decentralization. The culture of France, it is a patronistic culture in which a lot of respect is given to the person who is the boss, who is in the upper echelons of the organization and therefore decentralization cannot be in such a situation where you give a lot of respect to the boss, how to allocate the decision making lower levels. Even in UK, that is one of the most quick followers of the American culture and American values, even over there many companies they have simply named their personnel department as the human resource management department and you do not see an actual philosophical shift in the way they manage their human resources. So from this discussion, we see that it is not really a universal fact that human resource management has to be done on a particular set of rules, values and particular preferences. There needs to be a fit between what is imported from abroad and the local environment for the adoption of human resource management to be complete and successful. So there comes the importance of national culture that according to the culture of a country, human resource management concept will also be shaped. People will not look at human resource management as you read it in human resource management books imported from the America. Human resource management is a social construct which is going to be affected by the national culture and values and therefore there has to be a fit. So when we are talking about international human resource management, international human resource managers, they really need to make sure that the fit is established between the local culture and the imported values. And that can be implemented by recontextualization of the human resource policies. That is not possible without redefining and recontextualizing the human resource management concept. So that is basically the discussion about how human resource management can become a totally different context when the national culture is different from the other one.