CERIC Seminar with Professor Peter Boxall: “Strategic HRM: crafting, and contesting, an interdisciplinary field”

Peter Boxall is a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds, here he presents his interdisciplinary research on strategic human resource management.

Abstract

Strategic human resource management is an interdisciplinary field concerned with how human resource (HR) strategy sits within the overall strategy of an organization and how it varies across important organizational, industry and societal contexts. It is concerned with how HR strategies affect three sets of outcomes: organizational performance, the wellbeing of workers, and the wellbeing of societies in general. In the academic realm, researchers draw inspiration selectively from a range of sources: institutional economics and sociology, strategic management, organizational psychology, business and labour history, labour process theory, among others. This seminar will discuss how theory and research in strategic HRM has developed in the academic literature over the last 40 years. Which contributions to this body of work are worth taking seriously? Which ideas in the literature are heavily discredited or a waste of time? Which have value but need to be more strongly qualified or significantly adjusted by other perspectives? How well is the field integrated, and energized, around economically and societally important concerns, such as digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the social and environmental sustainability of HRM? Which empirical approaches are most needed if we wish to have greater impact on critical contemporary issues?

About the presenter

Peter Boxall (MCom Auck., PhD Monash, DistFHRNZ) is a Professor in Human Resource Management at the University of Auckland Business School and an international visiting professor in the Department of People, Work and Employment at Leeds University Business School. His research is concerned with strategic HRM and employee well-being and has appeared in such journals as Human Resource Management Journal, the Journal of Management Studies, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Economic and Industrial Democracy, and Work, Employment and Society. With John Purcell and Patrick Wright, he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press, 2007) and with Richard Freeman and Peter Haynes, he co-edited What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace (Cornell University Press, 2007). He is the co-author with John Purcell of Strategy and Human Resource Management, now in its fifth edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).