Human resource management practices - Contingent and political approaches

Human Resource Management is seemingly one of the last fields still looking for "one best way" approaches. French authors Pichault and Nizet propose t o break from this tradition with a new theory of HRM which tries to accommo date the diversity and mutations of today's society and organizational cont exts. They found their work on Mintzberg's celebrated 1982 "typology of org anizational forms," which they link to an actor-based perspective borrowed from Crozier and Friedberg's 1976 "strategic analysis". The authors bridge these two a priori contradictory approaches through the theory of organizat ional goals. Five HRM models are identified. The end result is that efficie nt HRM is not only contingent on organizational contexts, it also takes int o account the actors' interpretations, thus adding a typically political di mension to the framework. As such, Pichault and Nizet's perspective departs from most mainstream North American work. It is not without weaknesses, ho wever: For example, it still lacks a fully-fledged theory of coordination, a fault found with Mintzberg and with Crozier and Friedberg. Nevertheless, the approach has had practical applications. It is used in or ganizational consulting as well as in the classroom. Richly illustrated wit h cases, it can be very useful as a teaching strategy, as one of the review ers has discovered. One if its great benefits is to help students and pract itioners detect double bind situations and their personal and organizationa l consequences. Consequently, it is also of great value as a heuristics for fieldwork and the analysis of concrete organizational situations.