Despite over three decades of debate around the nature of human resource management (HRM), its intellectual boundaries and its application in practice, the field continues to be dogged by a number of theoretical and practical limitations. Written by an international team of respected scholars, this updated textbook adopts a critical perspective to examine the core management function of HRM in all its complexity - including its darker sides. Human Resource Management: A Critical Approach opens with a critique of the very concept of HRM, tracing its development over time, and then systematically analyses the context of HRM, practice of HRM and international perspectives on HRM. New chapters commissioned for this second edition look at HRM and the issues of diversity, migration, global supply chains and economic crisis. This textbook is essential reading for advanced and inquisitive students of HRM, and for HRM professionals looking to deepen their understanding of the complexities of their field.

Despite over three decades of debate around the nature of human resource management (HRM), its intellectual boundaries and its application in practice, the field continues to be dogged by a number of theoretical and practical limitations. Written by an international team of respected scholars, this updated textbook adopts a critical perspective to examine the core management function of HRM in all its complexity - including its darker sides. Human Resource Management: A Critical Approach opens with a critique of the very concept of HRM, tracing its development over time, and then systematically analyses the context of HRM, practice of HRM and international perspectives on HRM. New chapters commissioned for this second edition look at HRM and the issues of diversity, migration, global supply chains and economic crisis. This textbook is essential reading for advanced and inquisitive students of HRM, and for HRM professionals looking to deepen their understanding of the complexities of their field.

There has been a major revival of interest in State Capitalism: what it is, where it is found, and why it is seemingly becoming more ubiquitous. As a concept, it has evolved from radical critiques of the Soviet Union, to being deployed by neo-liberals to describe market reforms deemed imperfect, to settle into a middle ground, as a pragmatic way to describe the state assuming a role as an active economic agent, in addition to its regulatory, social, and security functions. The latter is the central focus of this book, although due attention is accorded to the origins of state capitalism and how it has changed over the years, as well as contemporary ways in which state capitalism may be theorized. This economic agency may assume direct forms, for example, via state owned enterprises. However, it may also be indirect, for example, actively serving private interests through promoting insider firms, who may occupy monopolistic market positions and perform outsourced state functions. In turn, this leads to raising salient governance questions. The latter may encompass agency tensions between public ownership, and political or even private interest control; it may also include issues of transparency and monitoring. Although state capitalism has often been depicted as the preserve of states in the global south, be they developmental or predatory, many forms of state capitalism are visible in mature economies, be they liberal or coordinated, and this is not always associated with superior governance arrangements; indeed, this is an area where clear and easy divisions between the "developing" or "emerging" world and the "developed" or "mature" world may increasingly be breaking down. This volume brings together the accounts of leading experts from around the world; it is explicitly multi-disciplinary, and both consolidates the existing knowledge base, and provides new, novel, and counter-intuitive insights.