ABSTRACT
This book provides some of the latest thinking on the subject of international human resource management from a European perspective. Although one of the very earliest contributions to the study of the international transfer of employees was undertaken by a Swedish expert (Torbiörn 1982), most of the early research and writing on the topic of international human resource management (HRM) was undertaken in North America and even the work that was done outside that country tended to follow the US (and Canadian) lead. Each of the contributors to the book acknowledges a debt to that work and incorporates it in the chapter. However, by the 1990s it became clear not only that European multinational corporations (MNCs) tended to manage their international workforce rather differently than did MNCs from the USA (or from Japan or other countries for that
matter) but that some European researchers in the area tended to be examining issues that were rather different from those being examined elsewhere. In some cases, as with the European MNCs, it could be argued that European researchers were taking the lead.
