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...

The lively debate about converging or diverging management practices is not yet decided. Human resource management (HRM) is no exception. Using the widely discussed issue of HR specialists handing over HR tasks to line management as an example, the article analyses whether European companies in...

Social systems theory as developed by Niklas Luhmann is an option for the theoretical foundation of Human Resource Management (HRM). After clarifying the advantages of using a grand (social) theory as the basic theoretical perspective, the roots of this social systems theory - the deterministic...

This paper uses insights and data gained from 15 years of involvement in a research network studying HRM developments in Europe to explore the notion of 'European HRM' and the meanings of convergence and divergence in HRM Using data from the last decade of the Cranet research, the paper puts...