Human resource management (HRM) has become for SMEs a critical factor of adaptation to an increasingly complex and uncertain business environment. Founded on open systems and contingency theory, the present study seeks to identify configurations of HR systems in manufacturing SMEs, and to...

Personnel economics is a rather young academic (sub-)discipline that applies (micro) economic methodology and insights to the personnel function of companies. It is scientifically fertile and complementary to other disciplinary approaches to personnel issues. Instead of that, an approach without...

Employer behavior (“Arbeitgeberverhalten”) plays an essential role when it comes to understanding Human Resource Management (HRM). However, rather few studies actually seem to take the concrete behavior of organizations as employers into account. Instead, German textbooks and journals are...

The deployment of labour is regulated by rules laid down in labour laws, collective labour agreements and internal company rulebooks. The subject of this article is how changes in the nature of the company and in the nature of the employment relationship affect the type of rules regulating the...

This paper considers how the demand for non-material aspects of jobs evolves over changing wealth levels and how firms may want to react. We first consider the importance of non-material job aspects in general before turning to two specific human resource practices: flexible working hour...

Over the last decades, HRM scholars associated the inclusion of women into HRM with the occupation’s loss of status. Such views have difficulties to explain more recent developments in Europe that show a co-evolution of feminization and status increase of HRM. In this article, we review these...