ABSTRACT
Historically, the management of employee (industrial) relations has been regarded as a part of the area of expertise, if not the province, of Personnel Management (PM) (see the IPD definition of employee relations included in the first chapter). However, in more recent times and with the emergence of Human Resource Management (HRM) there have been debates about who should be responsible for the management of employee relations in an organization, with the HRM school being associated with the drive to push this responsibility down to line managers. HRM has also been associated with an emphasis upon individualism and has been characterized as anti-trade union and underpinned by a unitarist perspective, whereas personnel management was considered consistent with pluralism, industrial relations and joint decision making. We briefly examine the elements of this debate and some of the models of HRM as part of the context within which changes in objective and management style have occurred.
