A critical review of human resource management studies (1978–2007) in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

The study reviews the empirical studies on human resource management (HRM) practices in mainland China published in 26 leading international journals across the span of 30 years in the period 1978–2007. We intend to achieve three aims in this review: (1) to take an inventory of what have been done so far in the field of HRM studies in China; (2) to critically evaluate the development of Chinese HRM practices in the past 30 years; and (3) to identify research gaps for what needs to be done in the future. Along with this critical review, we also examine which research methods have been used in the empirical inquiries; where the research has been published; and who has made the most contribution in the field of Chinese HRM studies. We conclude that what is known is comparative rather than definitive, with HRM in China treated as a subset of international HRM, rather than as a mainstream issue. With a quarter of the world's population affected by an understanding of what constitutes better HRM in China, we call for a more inclusive, collaborative approach to further theorising and substantiating HRM studies by researchers inside and outside China.

Keywords:

• China
• human resource management
• international
• institutional
• management
• performance
• personnel
• work practices

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our thanks for the helpful comments made by the anonymous reviewers, and Malcolm Warner's guidance in refining this study.

Notes

1. The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The number starts from zero, with no upper limit (Thomson Scientific, 1994/2008). For example, if a journal published 25 articles in 2005, and those 25 articles were subsequently cited a combined total of 125 times between 2005 and 2007, the journal's impact factor for 2005 would be 125/25 or 5.0.

2. We also carried out additional search for an non-SSCI but an area journal Asia Pacific Business Review, using the similar search method. The result was that two empirical studies (Goodall and Warner 1998; Bjorkman 2002) with key words ‘China’ and ‘HRM‘ were sparingly published between 1994–2009.