Capstone HRM: Dynamics and Ambiguity in the Workplace

Capstone HRM: Dynamics and Ambiguity in the Workplace provides students, academics and practitioners with an alternative view of activities associated with managing people at work. Assuming readers have a sound understanding of ‘best practice’ human resource management (HRM) techniques, it seeks to speak to people fascinated by the puzzle posed by the real world of human resource management (HRM).

HRM broadly refers to the activities associated with the management of the people who do the work of organisations, while strategic HRM assumes that HRM activities are integrated with strategic objectives, and improve organisational performance. Unfortunately, often HRM policies represent an intent rather than the actual practice of managing people.

Capstone HRM: Dynamics and Ambiguity in the Workplace grapples with these complexities, adopting a framework which captures the inter-relationships between national and international (macro) factors, organisational (meso) factors, and individual and group dynamics (micro) operating in the workplace.

This framework highlights a number of themes common to the modern, dynamic workplace, including:
• international and national factors
• globalization
• the contradictions and ambiguities of HRM policies and practices
• the desire to measure outcomes
• the embedded nature of ethics in HRM and SHRM, and its relationship to CSR
• the valuing of human and social capital.