Economic, social, cultural and political globalisation have all contributed to the growth of economic activity that cuts across national borders and to the emergence and proliferation of organisations that transcend national boundaries. Increasingly, organisations are engaged in employment contracts in multiple national employment systems. The human resources of organisations are located in multiple countries. Internationalisation thereby becomes a key challenge for practitioners and a dimension that cannot be taken as given or standard for scholars of HRM. In a context of the transformation of a growing number of organisations (and especially the largest ones) into “transnational social spaces”, HRM practices flow across borders. Some strategic scholarship argues that such flows are critical to the success of individual firms, and concentrate their efforts on identifying “best practices” that will yield the greatest leverage to each. Strategic scholarship is keen to understand what will work best to increase the efficiency and financial performance of multinational organisations. It also studies the various “glitches” that might obstruct flows or make the flows of HRM practices everywhere not always desirable.
This module examines the challenges of managing human resources against a backdrop of cross-cultural and institutional work contexts and teams, variation in local socio-political-legal contexts and the necessity for cross-border assignments. The analytical/critical approach to IHRM taken concerns itself with questions of whether employment (and HRM) practices are converging or diverging around the world, how power and politics are implicated in the internal dynamics of multinational corporations, and if the corporate social responsibility pledges for appropriate treatment of workers can possibly suffice to ensure a fair employment relationship in the absence of a transnational regulator, among others.