Celebrating and advancing the scholarship of David P. Lepak (1971–2017): special issue introduction

Abstract

This special issue is devoted to Professor David P. Lepak, who passed away on December 7, 2017. The special issue is meant to honor Professor Lepak’s (or affectionately called Dave among his close friends and peers) intellectual contribution to the field of human resource management (HRM) and his academic influence on many of us who study HRM-related topics. We first introduce the special issue by highlighting three research topics that were central to Dave’s work: (1) strategic management of human capital resources; (2) strategic HRM; and (3) multilevel HRM. We then introduce nine articles in the special issue and discuss how each of them contributes to one or more of the three topics of Dave’s interest. We also provide a general discussion of all the articles and offer directions for future research.

Keywords:

• David P. Lepak
• strategic human resource management
• strategic human capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We thank Xin Wen, a doctoral student from the Management and Human Resources PhD program at The Ohio State University, for helping us to conduct the bibliometric and cluster analyses.