Contextualizing HRM in China: differences within the country

Abstract

Through critical literature review, we introduce the special issue’s focus, ‘HRM in China: Differences within the country’. Researchers have, in practice, neglected to sufficiently contextualize HRM in China in order to identify, address and explain these differences. This has occurred despite continual calls for better contextualization, a theme common across other, overlapping fields: management in China; organizational behaviour; and HRM in general. A major impediment has been an unwillingness to contextualize beyond the organization or, perhaps the industry. This reflects dominant theoretical preferences in North America that produce literature-led research agendas and ‘outside-in’ research on China. In effect, academic pressures and the resulting literature also shape research approaches to contextualizing HRM in China. In seeking to promote phenomena-led research with ‘inside-out’ orientations, we highlight two important contextual conceptions of ‘differences’: diversity within China, especially where related to space and place; and rising evidence of expressed differences of interests within China’s labour markets. The rest of the article provides summary overviews of this special issue’s other seven articles, focusing on the phenomena they examine, the contexts they work with, the disciplines they embrace and the research designs/methods they employ. We conclude with suggestions for further research.

Keywords:

• China
• context
• HRM
• industrial relations
• interests
• locality

View correction statement:

Corrigendum

Introduction

Johns’ (2006) much-cited article on the lack of, and need for, greater engagement with context/s in organizational behaviour (OB) research speaks to human resource management (HRM) researchers, directly and indirectly. Direct connections flow from Johns’ use of HRM research as examples for some of his main points and for certain HRM practices, like turnover, selection or performance appraisal practices, as examples of both variables being examined and contexts for OBs (Johns, 2006, p. 390). Indirect connections come from the close relationship between OB and HRM. Put simply, if HRM as a field of practice, research and education draws its underpinning theory heavily from OB, then weaknesses in how OB research is conceptualized and carried out also affects what we know about and do with HRM. More recently, Batt and Banerjee (2012), in reviewing HRM studies in leading US and British management journals since mid-1990s, confirmed this picture. They found that, ‘studies that examine the connection between firm-level HRM practices and the external environment are few’ (2012, p. 1745). Kim and Wright (2011) make a similar point for the sub-field of strategic human resource management (SHRM).

The same is true of OB and HRM research in China despite admonitions from prominent scholars on the importance of context when examining management and organizations in China (Barney and Zhang, 2009; Li, Leung, Chen, & Luo, 2012; Tsui, 2006, 2013; Tsui, Zhao, & Abrahamson, 2007). Indeed, Anne Tsui’s intention, as founding Editor-in-Chief of Management and Organization Review (MOR), was to encourage context-sensitive scholarship. She has repeatedly called (e.g. Tsui, 2006, 2013; Tsui et al., 2007) for approaches that take their cues from phenomena, problems and unmet needs important to those involved or affected by management in China. Such ‘phenomena-driven’ agendas require ‘inside out’ approaches sensitive to, knowledgeable about, and engaged with the complex array of factors that compose Chinese contexts, including the main stakeholders (Van de Ven & Jing, 2012, pp. 126–29). This contrasts with the dominance of ‘outside in’ research whose safe, career-enhancing agenda has been ‘literature-driven’ publishing: taking topics well-recognized and popular in Western academia to examine ‘how they are manifested in the Chinese context’ (Tsui, 2006, p. 3). An interest in promoting phenomena-driven, inside-out HRM scholarship is, as we elaborate below, central to this special issue.

Important issues arise as to how to define ‘context’. Tsui’s list of elements is particularly useful for our special issue as it directly addresses ‘differences within the country’ that we highlighted in our call for papers. Thus, Tsui (2006, p. 2) includes:

… the culture, the political and legal system, the state of economic development, or the economic system at one point in time. It also includes the history, the geography, its ecology, and all that has transpired over time and in space that produced what and why a context is the way it is today. Contextualization means incorporating the context in describing, understanding, and theorizing about phenomena within it.

The aims of this article and special issue: highlighting differences within the country

In August 2014, in publishing our call for papers, this journal demonstrated its interest in fostering research and debate regarding ‘differences within the country’ in relation to HRM in China. As guest editors, our intention was to encourage inside-out approaches that delved more deeply and widely into how elements of China’s context shape HRM policies and practices, and may be shaped by them. This reflected our concern that the field’s apparent overwhelming preferences for literature-led research have caused the ignoring of these potential interactions. One result is that too much HRM research overlooks phenomena important to those working in and with HRM in local contexts. It also risks overlooking opportunities to produce more interesting and valuable knowledge. Or, as Tsui (2013, p. 376) argues, ‘our research may be not only irrelevant to practice but also irrelevant to knowledge’.

This article’s central questions are: How has the field of HRM in China engaged with notions of context? How can we explain these approaches? What are the undesired limitations of these approaches? What aspects of contemporary China – as context – require greater attention in HRM research? How do the articles in this special issue respond to these requirements? What do they, as a collection, contribute to the field?

In focussing on ‘differences within the country’, we sought to highlight two main senses of the term ‘differences’ relevant to the field. First, ‘differences’ can represent contextual variation as well as diversity in outcomes. Here, the purpose was to encourage authors to expand their horizons beyond the well-worn tracks – for research on HRM in China – of restricting discussion of contextual factors to a few organizational-level contextual variables: ownership type and nationality; firm size; industrial sector; age of firm. The need for such a broadening of vista beyond the firm would appear obvious given China’s continental-sized land mass; huge population; great diversity in landforms, climate and demography; its 5000 years of often localized cultural development; its storied history and diverse patterns of economic development (Zhang & Peck, 2016).

This meshed with our intent, echoing Tsui (2006), to encourage consideration of diversity and disparity within China – as nation, society, economy and even physical geography – as it relates to HRM, rather than to see the Chinese context as uniform. There is a particular need, as we explain below, to focus much more on the local context of HRM beyond the firm. Nonetheless, almost all who call for greater attention to China as context (for e.g. Barney & Zhang, 2009; Child, 2009; Jia, You, & Du, 2012; Li et al., 2012; Tsui, 2006, 2013; Tsui et al., 2007; Van de Ven & Jing, 2012; Whetten, 2009) overlook that local dimension, including its cultural and institutional manifestations. Our call, therefore explicitly encouraged contributions examining HRM in terms of: ‘cultural and institutional differences within China’; ‘patterns of local diversity and disparity in development levels within China’; ‘patterns of local diversity and their interactions with ‘industry type, ownership form and firm size’ (Sheldon, Sun, & Sanders, 2014, p. 2216).

A second understanding of ‘differences within the country’ implies different interests, goals, attitudes and opinions that motivate actions. Here, ‘differences’ invokes consideration of more pluralistic or even conflict-based forms of employment relations as they have emerged as contextual factors for HRM in China. For example, in recent years, there has been increasing report of a range of forms of workplace or wider labour market disharmony, grievance or conflict, evident in turnover, protest suicides, group protests or wildcat strikes (Chan, 2011; Lee, Brown, & Wen, 2016, p. 222; Li & Freeman, 2015, p. 711; Zhu, Warner, & Feng, 2011, pp. 136–137). Therefore, our call for papers also encouraged contributions that examined the relationships between firm-level management in China and, respectively, unions and employer associations; and, for example, the implications of the 2008 Employment Contract Law (sometimes called the Labour Contract Law) for HR managers, employees and others affected. These two ideas of ‘differences’ can and do merge given the contention of Zhang, Nyland, and Zhu (2010, p. 379), that ‘empirical findings show that HRM policy and practice are primarily based on local labour regulations’.

It is important to remember that ideas influencing organizational designs, policies and processes themselves reflect time and place, demographic and institutional factors. Disciplinary perspectives or academic imperatives can shape our views of what constitutes ‘context’ and how it operates. Researchers too often accept these ideas as given (Johns, 2006; Rousseau & Fried, 2001, pp. 3–5). China’s engagement with imported approaches to HRM is part of a much larger borrowing of foreign ideas and techniques that have enhanced China’s transition to a booming market economy in recent decades. It is thus necessary to recognize how these influences may affect both indigenous and overseas-based HRM scholars as this contributes to the direction and progress in the field.

For China’s policy makers and management practitioners, foreign direct investment (FDI) was, from the beginning, a major conduit of new approaches, initially via joint ventures (JVs) and then, more completely, through wholly foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs). This has spurred substantial research interest into whether imported ideas prevail over local ones, whether hybridization occurs and if so, on what basis and under what conditions (e.g. Björkman, Smale, Sumelius, Suutari, & Lu, 2008; Farley, Hoenig, & Yang, 2004).

Tertiary education has been another transmission source, particularly given strong central government support for formalizing HRM standards and enhancing international scholarly communication (Cao, Ping Li, & Li, 2013, p. 12). There are more than 2000 universities in China, one-seventh of them offering HRM/IR degree programmes at different levels, intensity and extent. There are more faculty members in China’s business schools who are doing research in HRM/IR or related fields and even more are teaching in these fields where Western ideas are so influential. The emergence in China of Western-style business schools and the teaching of Western-style business curricula at Chinese universities (Warner & Goodall, 2009) have also helped spread these ideas to increasingly profit-oriented state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and to the many privatized former SOEs.

Since the early 1990s, there has been a spectacular increase in international mobility of Chinese people. China’s enormous engagement in international trade, the very large numbers of Chinese people studying abroad (including PhD candidates) and the growth of China-based multinational enterprises (MNEs) have fostered the embracing of imported ideas, including into HRM. Processes of borrowing and/or adaptation of foreign ideas have also generated scholarly research on the degree to which HRM in China is developing Chinese characteristics and what, if any, these might be (Nankervis, Cooke, Chatterjee, & Warner, 2012; Warner, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013).

The next two sections explain, first, our view of ‘China as context’ for HRM practice and research, using our two conceptions of ‘differences’; and second, how research on HRM in China is itself a research context. They address this article’s first three main questions: how the field has engaged with notions of context; undesirable limitations flowing from those approaches; and matters requiring greater scholarly attention. Subsequent sections very briefly respond to the fourth and fifth questions: how the other articles in this special issue address these needs and their contributions to widening the field.

China as context

Differences in time, space and place

From the early 1980s until relatively recently, for overseas multinational enterprises (MNEs) considering foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, the main comparative advantage was China’s huge, cheap and compliant workforce. Over this period, many hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, whether as direct or labour-hire employees, have been absorbed into what was, originally, a nascent Chinese labour market, but one constructed by the Communist Party-state to maximize both economic development and its own continuing and uncontested rule. The legacy of Maoist China’s own economic underdevelopment – and uneven development – offered poverty-line wage costs to a rising tide of foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) and China’s own nascent, privately owned enterprises (POEs). As well, the Party-state provided a regulatory environment for the new labour market which greatly privileged employers over employees. Those organizations where labour received most employment protection, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), rapidly declined in number and workforce size (and share) from the 1990s via waves of bankruptcies, plant closures, privatizations and job shedding.

The external environment for HRM in China therefore includes the global economy, and most notably, the international economic and financial orders, global supply chains, investment and trading flows. Domestically, HRM policies and practices function within local and regional labour markets that aggregate into a national labour force of 915.83 million people (aged between 16 and 60) and an ageing population of nearly 1.4 billion people (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2016). The most recent generations of this vast labour force reflect the effects of China’s one-child policy. China is also a society-culture with 5000 years of history and a continent-sized spatial dimension. History and geography have created a multiplicity of local traditions, including powerful economic, social and linguistic ones.

Much of this reflects the ways in which China’s Party-state, in gradually reforming the economy, almost entirely devolved economic regulation and administration. Krug and Hendrischke (2008, p. 81) remind us that, in China, ‘local’ means the sub-provincial level where most businesses are registered. They also explain that, under this devolution, ‘each local jurisdiction can opt for its own mix of regulation and taxation’, and that mix ‘is subject to permanent bargaining and contracting within the [local] administration and between the administration and the business sector (p. 90)’.

For Krug and Hendrischke, this has fostered variability in local economic environments which, ‘puts in doubt whether or not China is on its way to achieving an integrated market, uniformity in institutional architecture and conformity in economic behaviour that would add up to a single business system’. Meyer (2008, p. 3) concurs: ‘localism is deeply ingrained in China. … Today, China is one country but many economies’. In the context of powerful localizing effects of devolved economic regulation, Krug and Hendrischke (2008, pp. 91–93) suggest three distinct models of local Party-state administration: (1) ‘arm’s length’ (akin to laissez-faire notions); (2) ‘developmental’ (with strong state intervention including via ownership and economic planning and direction); and (3) pre-corporatist (shares authority via negotiation with informal networks of local firms).

As the ‘world’s factory’ and its second largest economy, its industrialization has also rapidly urbanized China, creating a string of industrial mega-cities. Development patterns have been diverse, with large wealth and income disparities, most notably between highly developed eastern and southern coastal areas and the much less developed and poorer inland provinces. However, even relatively wealthy eastern provinces contain wide disparities between advanced, wealthy cities or towns and poor ones (Li, Sheldon, & Morgan, 2011; Zhang & Peck, 2016). One factor has been modernizing de-industrialization in China’s ‘rust belt’ areas, particularly in the north-east (Tomba, 2011). As well as (officially) local inhabitants/employees, the more dynamic centres contain vast numbers of migrant rural workers. Since the 1950s, government regulations have segmented those rural-origin migrant labourers as their official hometown resident registration status (hukou) has deprived them of a range of social rights and amenities enjoyed by the urban hukou-holders. According to Li and Feeman (2015, p. 711), between 1980 and 2010, ‘some 150–160 million persons without official household permits for urban residence migrated to work in the cities’. Zhang et al. (2010) thoughtfully direct research attention to the negative implications for those with rural hukou status of firms’ HRM policy and practice in ‘host’ cities. In Jiangsu for example, in 2006, the 9.03 million rural-status employees made up 66 per cent of that province’s urban workforce/s (p. 379). Interestingly, those authors point to local urban cultural as well as institutional factors contributing to systematic discrimination.

The above discussion suggests a number of Tsui’s (2006) contextual aspects may be highly salient. These include sensitivity to place and space, to time and tradition, to patterns of diversity as well as similarity. They suggest close consideration of how demographic and institutional factors, not just organizational ones, shape HRM. Yet, there is ample evidence that the context within which firms (and employees) make their labour market decisions has been changing substantially. This suggests opportunities for a multiplicity of phenomena-driven research questions examining the inter-relationships among these contextual factors and HRM policies and practices in China.

Differences in interests, goals and perspectives

To foster rapid, sustained inbound FDI in the service of maximizing economic growth, during the 1980s and 1990s, the Party-state embraced FIEs’ strong policy preferences for minimal external labour market regulation. This permitted employers to disregard labour market factors outside their firms beyond questions of supply and demand. In terms of HRM policy, practice and research, it encouraged perceptions that managers could unilaterally control their firms’ destinies, adopting and adapting as they wished from Chinese and foreign traditions. The figure of employer or senior manager was central. Furthermore, with autonomous unionism illegal, the ACFTU remained the only formallyaccepted conduit for employee voice within the world of work (apart from Party structures like Party cells). Until recently, its main purpose, however, had been to support managerial agendas on behalf of local Party-state authorities intent on maximizing economic development within their jurisdictions.

Yet, China’s spectacular economic growth has generated hugely unequal wealth and income distribution patterns that increasingly appear to threaten social harmony and, potentially, the Party-state’s hegemony. As well, Party-state institutional bulwarks fostering workplace consent, such as the enterprise unions within the ACFTU, by the late 1990s, were in steep decline numerically and functionally. Increasing employee dissatisfaction or dissent was emerging as a rapid labour turnover in more developed areas but also strikes, demonstrations and other forms of work protest mentioned above.

Aware of these challenges, China’s central government introduced broad agendas and targeted measures to make labour markets – and the wider society – fairer and the processes to achieve these more pluralistic. One aspect has been formal regulation, particularly since the 2008 Employment Contract Law (ECL) and other labour legislation that year. According to Zhu et al. (2011, p. 130), that 2008 law, ‘reflects the Party’s increasing awareness of emergent social tensions arising from the new power imbalances in the workplace and the less egalitarian income-and wealth-distribution now found in China’. For Lee et al. (2016, p. 215), this amounts to nothing less than ‘Reversing the deregulation drive of the 1990s, China has moved to re-regulate labour’. Indeed, Lee et al. assert (2016, p. 232) that, ‘The Chinese government is clearly committed to a collective approach to employment. There is no question of the individualization of employment relations that has been encouraged in some other countries’.

The Party-state’s official shift to emphasizing ‘building harmonious labour relations’ clearly has important HRM implications. While Zhu et al. (2011, pp. 129–130) argue that it is unclear what ‘harmonious’ means precisely, the Party-state has put pressure on the ACFTU to initiate workplace-based initiative to soften some of China’s dramatic socio-economic inequalities. Scholarship on local union initiative (e.g. Kuruvilla, Lee, & Gallagher, 2011; Pringle, 2011) indicates that change was underway already before 2008. The 2001 Trade Union Law had already formally re-prioritized the task of ACFTU unions to stress ‘safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of workers’ (Lee, C.H. 2009 cited in Lee et al., 2016, p. 218). This suggests a sectional and potentially class- or societal-oriented role for unions, not just an enterprise-directed one. That law also allowed for the establishment of union bodies ‘above’ the single enterprise, by locality or sector.

Since 2008, employers, particularly privately owned firms, have also responded to pressures, accepting the establishment of enterprise unions, (Zhu et al., 2011, pp. 133–136). Indeed, Lee et al. (2016) suggest that, ‘Nowadays, enterprises are expected to have trade unions, collective bargaining and workers’ congresses among institutions’ and these are expected to also behave more effectively. What might be the HRM implications, for example, of the objectives the ACFTU set itself in 2011 (Lee et al., 2016, pp. 220–221) of achieving ‘universal’ union membership and widespread collective bargaining coverage for China’s workforce? It is clear that HR managers and local administrators (as well as ACFTU officials) have been facing new challenges – to their knowledge and practical expertise – from these changes.

These sorts of initiatives have also tied local firms, government authorities and union bodies into localized tripartite bodies (Lee et al., 2016, p. 218). All this indicates roles for unions that go beyond the enterprise. Moreover, alongside these bottom-up initiatives, the ACFTU has developed top-down organizing initiatives to recruit members, including backing local initiatives to organize within important FIEs. Walmart in/famously maintains a strict union avoidance strategy in its home country, the USA. Yet, in 2006, the ACFTU strongly backed local union organizing campaigns at Walmart China – including through protests – in order to unionize employees. They forced Walmart’s China management to recognize the unions and collectively bargain.

It is thus clear that the field needs to widen its focus beyond the enterprise, in both spatial and regulatory/bargaining terms. Once this occurs, broader phenomena-driven, ‘inside-out’ questions tend to mesh the two types of ‘differences within the country’. Thus, following Krug and Hendrischke (2008), we would expect quite different localized regimes of IR regulation and enforcement across China. This has implications, for example, for Kim and Wright’s (2011) proposition that employers will gain more from implementing high commitment work systems where their jurisdictional context includes weaker external regulatory IR influences on management. For their part, Lee et al. (2016), examine how the ACFTU – and some employer associations (see also Lee, Sheldon, & Li, 2011) – have nurtured collective bargaining at the local level. Governments have encouraged these developments, especially for indigenous privately owned SMEs, often marginal to the development of IR structures and processes. Indeed, Lee et al. (2016) note that these bargained agreements have now come to include wider HRM considerations like promotion policy and access to training.

Academic HRM publishing as context

The vast interest in HRM in China has been reflected in ever-increasing supply of articles and books and the growing number of review articles and dedicated special issues of journals. In the past decade, more than 50 books and hundreds of academic papers on HRM in China (or Chinese HRM) have been published, including edited books, proceedings, five special issues (not including those on related topics such as OB and leadership). As well, there are now specialist journals on China, somewhat or entirely dedicated on HRM: Chinese Management Studies; Journal of Chinese Human Resource Management (JCHRM); and MOR). In 2009, Chinese Management Studies published a special review issue on ‘HRM in China’, and a special issue on ‘HRM and Leadership’ in 2012. The International Journal of Human Resource Management (IJHRM), too, has played a very important role in encouraging and showcasing research on HRM in China often through the leadership of one of the field’s pioneers, Malcolm Warner, in particular, through special issues that sometimes gain re-publication in book form (see e.g. Warner, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). A recent overview of the development of HRM in China appeared in a special issue of HRM Review (Zhang, 2012). Other journals, in cognate or more-broadly defined fields have also carried a substantial amount of important research that directly treats HRM in China as well as articles that support our understanding of it. Important contributions have also featured in Asia-focused management journals like Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Asia-Pacific Journal of Human Resources and Asia Pacific Business Review. Nevertheless, there are two main ways in which scholars tend to orient their research on HRM in China.

Publishing for the HRM field

Much of the specialized, English language academic scholarship on management (including HRM), in China prioritizes certain forms of scholarship in order to gain inclusion in leading Western journals. In particular, they prioritize theory building, development and testing related to accepted Western-oriented or-derived theory. Mostly, China merely provides convenience samples for the important game that is happening elsewhere: essentially in North American-oriented academic institutions around the world, including in Chinese-speaking ones (Jia et al., 2012, pp. 185–189, 199–200; Tsui, 2006, pp. 3–4; Van de Ven, & Jing, 2012, p. 124). Paradoxically, rapid expansion of the academic study of HRM in Chinese universities appears to feed this tendency as Western scholars can relatively easily collect (non-contextualized) data in China by hiring Chinese PhD students as research assistants to access the large Chinese databases. Indeed, Bainbridge, Sanders, Cogin and Lin (forthcoming) identify that, in the last 20 years, there has been an increase in samples using data from China to examine the relationship between HRM practices and outcomes.

This underplays China as context and local or indigenous views. It neglects or minimizes attention to local dynamics that might otherwise influence the sorts of questions asked, literatures examined, research designs chosen, and explanation of results obtained. The risk of this ‘outside-in’ approach is that it ‘may miss the truly important management or organization issues for the greater potential of developing innovative theories’ (Tsui et al., 2007, p. 172). For Warner (2013, p. 117), the results are too often ‘formulaic’ and ‘highly predictable in what they cover, how they do so and what conclusions they derive’.

A fundamental weakness has been the overwhelming focus on the firm, unit, team or individual levels, assuming, at least implicitly, uniform conditions and experiences across cities, and lower-level localities. Even where there is a concerted, conscious attempt to engage with China as context, reversion to accepted (but blinkered) pathways dominates. MOR, for example, appears to have hosted no HRM articles on China with place or space as contextual factors apart from a few international business studies, a field already very engaged with geography. One could make a similar argument about the paucity of historical contributions (see e.g. Zhu, Zhang, & Shen, 2012 as an exception).

For example, in a 2014 MOR forum honouring John Child’s longstanding, eminent contribution to research on management in China, contributors highlighted Child’s singular contribution in embedding phenomenon-driven research within its context. Yet, despite genuflecting towards ‘deep contextualization’, the contributions here of Child, the guest editor and the other contributors all overlooked any spatial element of the context/s that China provides. Despite in-depth discussion about the importance of local (Chinese) institutions and political relationships for current as well as future research agendas, we get no further than the usual contextual suspects: ownership form; industry and aspects of Chinese culture (e.g. Child & Marinova, 2014a, p. 388). While Meyer (2014, p. 374) mentions that ‘Child considers not only the immediate environment of the organizations he is studying, but also the broader socio-political environment within which the organization and its industry are embedded’, for Child and Marinova (2014b, p. 408), there exist only a macro level (‘the national system’), and a micro (‘the globalizing firm’).

The broader English language HRM literature on China also, not surprisingly, largely treats China as a national labour market or, at most, a series of broad regional ones. In part, it results from taking for granted pervasive assumptions flowing from the grand narrative of China’s ‘transition’ since 1979 (Sheldon, Kim, Li, & Warner, 2011, pp. 2–4). China is examined as one country with the same societal values, ideological system, institutional changes and one-child policy (e.g. Zhao & Du, 2012). Indeed, recent surveys or overviews of the field, do not even list locality or space as a level or topic of analysis (Cooke, 2009; Poon & Rowley, 2007; Warner, 2009; Zheng & Lamond, 2009; Zhu, Thomson, & De Cieri, 2008). The same has been true even of recent special issues in IJHRM, for example in 2011 on ‘Society and HRM in China’, and in 2012 on ‘Whither Chinese HRM’. None of the articles hosted addressed questions of location. For JCHRM, despite repeated editorial exhortations for phenomena-driven, context-rich research (e.g. Wang, Zhang, Lamond, & Ke, 2014), the main inside-out advance has been to widen and deepen the range of Chinese cultural aspects studies. Again, questions of locality largely fail to emerge.

The preference has been to disaggregate by form and/or nationality of ownership, sectoral identity, firm size and/or age. This has become paradigmatic in ways overlooked by leading authors and editors who still see the local as the national scale. The upshot has been the ignoring of the implications, for HRM, of regional and more localized patterns of dynamism, diversity and disparity widely acknowledged in cognate fields on China such as developmental economics, policy studies, regional studies, innovation studies, anthropology, sociology and most obviously, economic geography. This is even more concerning given that the topics they research either directly or indirectly deal issues within the HRM field, particularly in relation to recruitment, skills shortages and training (e.g. Chen, 2007; Fan, Hall, & Wall, 2009; Jonas, 1996; Ramirez, Li, & Chen, 2013; Sun & Wen, 2007; Yang, Lee, & Lin, 2012; Zhang & Peck, 2016).

Until very recently, and with few exceptions, the HRM literature has ignored local labour markets (LLMs) and their relevance for firm-level HRM, despite what appear to be distinct LLM influences on skills shortages, labour turnover and poaching (Li & Sheldon, 2010; Sheldon & Li, 2013; Sheldon et al., 2011). As a consequence, there is an implied assumption that managing employees should present the same challenges across China, and produce similar effects. Yet, with China’s vast territory and population, geographical and cultural diversity and spatially uneven development, an LLM focus is particularly relevant for examining experiences of HRM (and IR), including interactions between local and sectoral patterns.

In terms of the second type of ‘differences’, outside-in approaches have largely couched HRM in China in essentially functionalist, employer-centred ways to replace the previously hegemonic ‘personnel management’ systems under the Maoist political economy (Ding & Warner, 2001). These types of approach to HRM have made it difficult to develop more nuanced approaches that highlight emerging IR developments. This is not surprising; the two main patrons of the transmission of an employer-centred HRM into China were China’s developmental Party-state and foreign-based MNEs. Both saw opportunities from a absenting employers from labour market restrictions and avoiding certain practices and institutions – like independent unionism and collective bargaining – that had emerged with capitalist development in other countries.

Western-oriented scholars have largely accepted these essentially ideological parameters as given. Instead they have focused on de-contextualized firm-based studies, privileging employer-preferred outcomes such as firm performance, and individualized or group-level relationships and behaviours functional for management (for one overview, Kim, Wright, & Su, 2010). With some noticeable exceptions (e.g. Cooke, 2009; Taylor, Chang, & Li, 2003; Warner, 2013), until recently, IR in China has appeared largely invisible to Western-based HRM scholars.

The dominance of outside-in research generates a narrowing of perspectives, but also approaches and findings. Because the purpose is to deductively test received theory in a new context, there is an overwhelming use of quantitative empirical studies. This style of research is also highly attractive to those academics at Chinese universities, who through second-guessing the demands of Western journals, seek to assist their institutions’ ambitions regarding international research rankings (Cao et al., 2013, p. 130, 2005, p. 14; Tsui et al., 2007, p. 172).

As Tsui (2006, p. 4) argues, a ‘paucity of inductive theory may be hampering the advancement of Chinese management knowledge’. This and the relative lack of qualitative and in-depth case approaches appear to inhibit the field’s capacity to recognize, identify and explain, apparently idiosyncratic HRM features in a Chinese context. Overall too, there is a general disregard for the use of historical work beyond broad comparisons of pre- and post-1979 developments. Yet, in properly addressing changes to either type of differences within the country, the HRM field needs to develop its own historiography.

Publishing for China-oriented studies

The opposite case features leading journals, like China Journal or China Quarterly, that focus on HRM, narrowly defined. However, typically, they don’t engage with the theoretical concerns of these fields (e.g. Chan, 2011; Kostka, 2012). Rather context and local dynamics rule and there is little attempt to understand Chinese experiences beyond their own terms. Within the HRM literature, there are authors who also take an inside-out approach, most notably, Cooke (Cooke, 2011a, 2012b; Cooke, Lin, & Jiang, 2013; Cooke & Zhan, 2013). Another good example is Zhang et al. (2010) on hukou status and HRM.

An indigenous version of this involves China-based domestic scholars who publish in Chinese-language books, journals and reports. There is some overlap with the China-as-area studies approach. However, many also prioritize engaging publishing as contributing to informed debate on policy and practice within China (for discussion of this, see e.g. Cao et al., 2013; Liang, Xie, & Cui, 2010). Nonetheless, because they publish in local, Chinese-language outlets, their studies are largely invisible to Western scholars. This has resulted in an unbalanced exchange of knowledge. In encouraging contributions from scholars working in these fields, we hoped that the field might learn more from these local scholars as well as from those working from ‘outside’ but using inside-out approaches to address phenomena-based questions deriving from China as context.

Overall, its origins and major patrons have marked the practice of HRM in China and the burgeoning literature on it in two fundamental ways. As mentioned earlier, both in practice and in the Western-directed literature, there has been a dominant focus on the firm level (and below). The second has been to see HRM in China in essentially functionalist, employer-centred ways. Indeed, most of the mainstream HRM literature unites these tendencies. We have argued that ignoring phenomena important to those engaged in and with HRM in China, and the contexts in which these phenomena are embedded, constitutes an impediment to better scholarly understanding of HRM in China, and to improved policy-making and practice, whether at the firm, local or national levels. We now turn to the other articles contributed to this issue.

The articles in this issue

Our purpose, for this special issue, has been to encourage approaches that address either or both notions of ‘differences within’ China, to encourage more sensitive and complex considerations of the context for HRM in China. The seven articles all privilege phenomena-driven topics and a concern for the contexts in which they manifest. The overall contribution, we feel, is a collection that provides grounded, realistic and stimulating treatments of HRM in China, and more useful knowledge. They respond to critiques and suggestions in favour of broadening the scope of topics studied and questions asked, contexts examined, disciplines and theories called upon, approaches and research designs/methods used. While responding to widely identified weaknesses in the literature, they also form a heterogeneous collection. Rather than summarizing each, as we believe their findings, conclusions and implications speak for themselves, we now briefly identify how those articles contributed to the special issue according to phenomena pursued, contextual factors considered, disciplinary approaches and theories used, and research design and methods employed.

Phenomena and contextual factors

The articles, in order, are: (1) Chen, Su and Zeng on the historical evolution of HRM in China; (2) Ouyang, Liu and Zhang on organizational and regional influences on the adoption of high-involvement HR systems (HIHRS) in China; (3) Wang, Song, Cheng, Luo, Gan, Feng and Xie on the effectiveness of the 2008 Employment Contracts Act in its stated purpose of diffusing the signing of formal employment contracts; (4) Kim and Chung on how employers in China choose to respond to the stronger regulatory regime since the Employment Contracts Act in their use of illegal overtime; (5) Cooke, Xie and Duan on the sources of workers’ grievances at work in China and the HRM mechanisms by which employers seek to resolve them; (6) Guo, Tian, Han, Johnson and Zhao on factors determining pension insurance participation China; and (7) Huang on the factors re-shaping payment systems in Chinese automotive firms.

The article by Chen, Su and Zeng (1), with its substantial educative significance, should provoke scholars to re-think how they see our field. It also serves as context for the other articles, each of which is provoked by and responds to serious, contemporary issues for researchers and China’s stakeholder practitioners: managers, HRM professionals, employees, union and employer association officials, local government officials and labour activists. Phenomena-driven, they all deal with important issues that affect what happens at work and/or what people contribute to and receive from their working lives in China.

Some target phenomena (factors or dependent variables) pertain to the individuals, others involve either alone or combined, individual firms, industries, or China’s workforce. For example, Chen et al. (1) manage to combine all these different levels in their historical study. In terms of context, we find both sources of ‘differences within the country’ well represented. Many of the articles continue the dominant tradition of examining organization-level variables, like ownership, size, industry, corporate strategy and product market position. However, innovation has come through linking these to contextual factors beyond the organization. Strengthened labour market regulation since 2008 is an important contextual factor in almost all contributions, especially via the 2008 ECL but also unions, employer associations and local government officials. For diversity within the country, employees’ hukou status is an important factor in some articles as are employer’s provincial or city locations and local labour market dynamics. We were not able to publish any articles that brought together culture and locality with HRM.

Disciplinary approaches and theories

Consistent with Tsui’s (2006, p. 10) call for an ‘interdisciplinary assault in contextualization’, we welcomed studies that drew on insights from disciplines and fields like anthropology, sociology, political science, industrial relations, economic geography, history and media studies as well as OB, management and psychology (Sheldon et al., 2014). Most of the seven articles explicitly combine HRM approaches (and literatures) with those from organizational theory (particularly its sociological variants) and/or IR. One article comes largely from history (1) and another, political science/policy studies (6). It is a shame that we were not able to publish contributions from an even wider set of disciplines.

According to Kim and Wright (2011, p. 156) where HRM scholars have attempted ‘to explain interactions between HRM and external factors’, they largely relied on one or more of three perspectives to do so: neo-institutionalism; resource dependence theory; and cross-cultural research. Again, the collection here is broader and more pluralistic. None of the articles focus on culture-based explanations, apart from Chen, Su and Zeng (1) who used cultural patterns in more concrete as well as institutional ways, and historically. Across the seven articles, resource dependence theory is used twice, and various aspects of neo-institutional theory, three times. Mostly they are combined with one or more of the other theories used: the resource-based view (twice), path dependence theory, the new economics of personnel, organizational justice theory and the Advocacy Coalition Framework.

Research approaches, designs and methods

Among those calling for more contextualized or even indigenous approaches, there is strong support for greater inductive (and abductive) studies (Li et al., 2012; Van de Ven & Jing, 2012) as well as qualitative research methods. For the management field in general, Rousseau and Fried (2001, p. 6) argue, ‘at a minimum, contextualization requires a thicker description of the setting(s) to help the reader and those researchers who would build upon the study understand the factors that gave rise to the researcher’s observations’. For Chinese management research, Li et al. (2012) urge greater attention to qualitative research methods: ‘Indigenous research in Chinese management, which is typically rooted in the historical contexts of a locality, cannot and should not blindly imitate the narrowly defined ’scientific’ methods’ (p. 12). We encouraged inductive (as well as deductive) approaches for the special issue, and qualitative methods: case study; historical and/or comparative approaches; grounded theory and/or action research; use of context-rich locality focus for HRM policies and practices; approaches that highlighted the importance, for HRM practices, of particular local cultures, traditions and ways of life; and those focused on the importance of local human and material resources.

We are pleased with the heterogeneity in research design, methods and research approaches the authors have used and also that they have collected and analysed data in advanced ways. In combination, this introduces more insights into the theme of HRM in China: differences within a country, while assisting in strengthening the legitimacy and confidence of HRM researchers on China. There are three qualitative papers, the first two mentioned below having an inductive approach; the other is deductive.

Chen, Su and Zeng (1) use qualitative historical analysis coupled with sociological theorizing, when drawing on detailed primary sources, like ancient texts, archival documents, statistical reports, inscriptions on ancient stone tablets; as well as diverse second sources. Cooke, Xie and Duan (5) on workers’ grievances and management grievance resolution mechanisms, use qualitative data from managers and employees in four large manufacturing case study firms, two state-owned and two private, located in two neighbouring local labour markets. This study follows an exploratory, multi-case study approach using mainly semi-structured for data collection. Finally Huang (7) in developing the notion of ‘responsible pay systems’, draws on qualitative case study data produced in two waves across six Chinese automakers over 10 years. The author applied deductive case study methods of hypothesis testing.

The other four articles use either mixed qualitative and quantitative designs, or solely quantitative ones. Ouyang, Liu and Zhang’s (2) work on organizational and regional influences on adoption of HIHRS used a national sample of 247 call centre establishments, collecting data form general and senior HR managers. Wang et al. (3) on the ECL’s effects on patterns of employment contract signing use a huge data-set from the ACFTU’s Sixth and Seventh Surveys of Chinese employees (approximately 80,000 individuals) undertaken in 2007 and 2012. Kim and Chung (4), in explaining organizational responses to emerging IR regulatory pressures on illegal overtime use, report results of quantitative research using survey data from 182 electronic parts firms in the highly developed Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces. The authors undertook multiple rounds of fieldwork, and interviewed over 200 individuals, including top managers, HR managers and representatives of foreign business associations. Guo et al. (6), in explaining pension insurance participation rates, adopt a mixed methods approach. Initial qualitative research assisted in formulating grounded research questions for the subsequent quantitative stage. For the quantitative part, the authors conducted econometric analysis using China’s EmployerEmployee Matched Survey data (N = 3412) from 12 cities representative of China’s diverse geographic and urban composition. Finally the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews to help explain, interpret and expand upon the quantitative findings.

Suggestions for future research

We would like to see more HRM work on China informed by more diverse disciplinary perspectives than appeared here, particularly from macro sociology, geography and anthropology, development studies or, even better, combinations among them. There is greater scope now for studies of HRM in China to be influenced by legal studies, a pattern well accepted in Western countries. It would be good to see more work that draws on political science or political sociology. One example would be to take Krug and Hendrischke’s (2008) three models of local party-state administration (discussed above) and explore their implications for firms’ HRM policies and practices in different localities.

Furthermore, there is great scope to revisit culture-centred explanations that assume a uniform set of cultural understandings, norms and preferences across the length and breadth of China. Can researchers identify regional/local sub-cultures that might influence HRM functions, or how firms interact with local administrations over HRM issues? Would they in any way influence the ways in which HR and IR factors interact? Would these change over time (convergence/divergence) with modernization, industrialization, de-industrialization and urbanization? Would they operate differently in SOEs compared to POEs? If local sub-cultures are salient, how do FIEs and their expatriate managers learn work with them? Given the diversity of phenomena to be examined, questions asked, and contexts studied, it is only appropriate that the field continues to encourage diversity in research approaches, designs and methods.