مدیریت منابع انسانی استراتژیک: نقد مبتنی بر قدرت Strategic human resource management: a power based critique

1. INTRODUCTION The Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) literature has sought to characterise the Employment relationship, in as objective a way as possible in order to come up with prescriptive typologies of courses of action that the HR department must take in order to link up to firm level strategy on the one hand and link down to desired employee behavior on the other. Yet, time and again, fitment issues have plagued empirical attempts at modeling these complex relationships. Empirical contexts in turn such as implications for and by multiple stakeholders, ethical issues for society at large and outcomes for specific varieties of work, careers, psychological contracts and employment relationships have remained unaccounted for. Chadwick and Cappelli, (1999) note that ‘neat models’ that encapsulate strategy typologies into SHRM body of knowledge have been the order of the day with little regard to contextual details. The absence of context awareness in turn makes difficult the operationalisation of SHRM theory into HRM practice and performance outcomes. This article thus reviews the relevant literature that lies in these fitment issues and offers to bridge this conceptual gap by proposing a ‘Power’ theory based nomothetic, typological synthesis for crafting the business-facing Human Resource (HR) function. The method used is that of thematic review, content analysis, and inductive theorizing. We argue that the power perspective as articulated by Townley (1993) and as originally conceived by Foucault, manifests as the meta-theory that can serve to subsume the closely aligned and yet multitude of theorizations, thus enabling a much required streamlining of constructs and ‘value laden’ synthesis of the literature.