ABSTRACT
Since the first edition of this book (Sparrow et al. 2004) there have been profound changes in the world business scene. Long ago Sparrow and Hiltrop (1997), interested at the time in how HRM professionals ‘transition’ their HRM systems from one mentality to another, argued that, in reality, HRM professionals (and academic study) had to accept and manage three potentially competing realities. The first of these – still true today – is that the majority of human resource management (HRM) inside organizations remains distinctly national. Although we outline an exciting agenda and range of developments inside organizations in this book, our starting assumption is that much HRM remains geography- and country-specific. This is not territory that we shall dwell on much in this book – these topics have been aired by many of the other books in this Routledge Series on Global Human Resource Management, and of course form the basis of the cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives on international human resource management (IHRM).
