The place of International Human Resource Management in International Business.
| Verfasser | Welch, Denice |
Abstract This article addresses the issue of whether International Human Resource Management (IHRM) is disconnected from other International Business (IB) studies. A content analysis was conducted of 383 articles published in five main international business journals used by IHRM scholars as outlets for their work over a 21 year time span. We classified the articles into two streams of IHRM research: international assignment management and what we term MNC-related research. These streams were found to be given almost equal research attention, developing in tandem across the time period examined. A thematic analysis of articles within each stream facilitated the identification of areas receiving the most research concentration, those with partial attention, and topics yet to be explored. A third stream of articles we designated as non-empirical allowed consideration of theoretical developments within the field. This assessment demonstrates how IHRM is developing a stronger connection with more general IB research.
Keywords Content analysis * Field evolution * Multinational HRM * Non-expatriate workforce * International assignees * Expatriates
1 Introduction
How to effectively manage the expatriate process has been a core research question in International Human Resource Management (IHRM). Sparrow (2009, p. 4) suggests this focus may be attributed to the somewhat prescribed nature of human resource management that directs research to "issue-driven concerns" faced by human resource practitioners in multinational companies. But IHRM scholars generally consider that the field has moved on from its earlier preoccupation with expatriation. As the authors of several overviews have concluded, the IHRM field has rapidly developed into an area concerned with the wider range of people-related issues in multinational firms (see e.g., Ferner 2009; Schuler and Tarique 2007; Sparrow 2009; Stahl et al. 2012).
Broadening the scope of research enquiry, though, has resulted in a blurring of the definitional boundary of what constitutes IHRM. As research has extended into broader multinational management issues, such as the transfer of HRM practices into subsidiary operations, some scholars have suggested that IHRM overlaps with, or is subsumed into, the related research areas of comparative human resource management and cross-cultural management (see e.g., Harzing and Pennington 2011; Sparrow 2009). However, based on definitions used in key texts and handbooks, it would seem that the prevailing consensus is that IHRM is concerned with all the issues related to the management of people in the MNC context (Dowling et al. 2013; Evans et al. 2011; Stahl et al. 2012); and thus falls under the international business research umbrella.
A lack of clarity as to what delineates IHRM makes it difficult to explain to 'outsiders' what IHRM involves as a scientific field. For the broader international business (IB) scientific community, IHRM may appear to be a field preoccupied with expatriate management and its related activities--particularly expatriate adjustment. As IHRM scholars, we have heard IB colleagues comment that 'IHRM equals expatriate management'. Of more concern perhaps is the identification by the current co-editors of the Journal of International Business Research (JIBS), of what they term a disconnection of IHRM from other IB studies (Cantwell and Brannen 2011). While IHRM scholars may dispute these observations, it does reflect how the field may be perceived within the IB research community. The challenge is to demonstrate that IHRM scholars are engaged with broader IB-related issues; that the growing body of IHRM research findings make important contributions to answering what Peng (2004) describes is the overarching IB research question: What determines the success and failure of internationalising firms.
One way of meeting this challenge is to map the field of IHRM. As Williams and Plouffe (2007, p. 408) comment: "Systematically analysing the state of knowledge development in an academic field is a critical step in any discipline's growth and maturity". We therefore conducted a content analysis of IHRM publications in five journals considered to be the major IB outlets for those engaged in IHRM-related research. The objective was to determine research streams and topic areas to provide a general thematic overview of where research interest has lain over a selected time period. The resulting database of 383 articles constituted a research map covering a span of 21 years, broken into three time periods: 1990-1996; 1997-2003 and 2004-2010. Through an analysis of the resulting database, we are able to provide reasonable evidence that IHRM research does not equal expatriate management, though that remains an important stream of inquiry. Instead, IHRM is becoming multi-level in focus and draws on different disciplines and methodological approaches to explain the contribution of people management to the success of the internationalising firm.
In addition, our results reveal what could be likened to a mosaic of the IHRM field. Building on the mosaic metaphor, our content analysis depicts where the picture is strongly visible (the field's research concentration); where it is merely incomplete outlines (areas that have received partial attention); and blank patches awaiting the attention of the artist (areas that have been ignored or neglected). While we deliberately avoid setting out a prescriptive research agenda, we draw attention to areas where IHRM research can make a stronger contribution to IB research in general.
2 Methodology
As explained above, our purpose was to map the field of IHRM. A content analysis was therefore deemed the appropriate methodology, rather than a meta-analysis or a literature review. Meta-analysis is a technique that combines of the results of comparable studies to produce a quantitative estimate of overall effect of a phenomenon, and to provide a single conclusion with greater statistical power (Borenstein et al. 2009; Rosenthal and DiMatteo 2001). A narrative or critical literature review is useful if one is concerned with theoretical development or evaluation, or to provide an overview of research into a particular topic (Baumeister and Leary 1997). In contrast, content analysis methodology allows scholars to objectively analyse published text in a systematic way to build a picture of a field's accrued knowledge (Williams and Plouffe 2007).
Content analysis has been applied in many ways across a variety of academic disciplines and research traditions (Duriau et al. 2007). Although there is no single set of rules or protocols, there are guidelines regarding the creation and definition of categories, coding of data, and assessing reliability and face validity (Downe-Wambolt 1992). It is more than frequency counts. It involves thematic coding of text content to structure meanings and trends inferred from open-ended data (Graneheim and Lundman 2004). Content analysis thus provides the appropriate scientific tool to obtain "a systematic, qualitative and quantitative description of the manifest content of literature in an area" (Li and Cavusgil 1995, p. 251).
As we now detail, our content analysis involved several steps: Journal selection and time period; compilation of the database; and article categorisation and thematic coding. Aspects related to reliability and validity of the generated database and the coding process we followed are explained for each of these steps.
2.1 Journal Selection and Time Period
Journal selection was predicated on our purpose to systematically build a picture of the IHRM field's accrued knowledge. We did not seek to determine the impact of any specific article; nor try to establish the field's most influential authors. Rather, we sought to establish patterns of how IHRM researchers over time have contributed to our understanding of what determines success or failure as a firm internationalises. Thus, we confined our selection to IB journals. We began with the only extant published ranking of IHRM outlets, compiled by Caligiuri (1999) that placed the International Journal of Human Resource Management (IJHRM), the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) and Management International Review (MIR) as the top three international journals used as outlets for IHRM publications. To give additional breadth and depth to our mapping exercise, we added Journal of World Business and International Business Review, which consistently feature among the highest ranking IB journals; for instance, they ranked second and third among the IB journals (after JIBS) in the 2010 ISI Web of Knowledge citation index. While we acknowledge that our search is not exhaustive, it is comprehensive enough to provide a representative body of IHRM publications, and is similar to that taken by Li and Cavusgil (1995) in their assessment of international marketing over a decade. This has been supported by a recent analysis of expatriate research that found that the field was "still being covered by a low number of different journals" (Dabic et al. 2013, p. 7). Details relating to the five journals are presented in the Appendix.
IJHRM is considered by scholars in the field of IHRM research as the 'leading outlet' (Mayrhofer and Reichel 2009, p. 41). It was first published in 1990 and it seemed appropriate to make that calendar year our starting point. Thus, the analysis covers 21 years, finishing the review of each journal at the last issue of 2010. Three time periods of 7 years each are used: 1990-1996; 1997-2003, and 2004-2010. We recognize that the choice of time period was a somewhat arbitrary one, as was the division of the 21 years into three equally long periods (see Furrer et al. 2008, for a similar approach). The time periods and chronological presentation of our dataset of articles reflect the mapping purpose.
2.2 Compilation of the Database
The next step was to compile the...
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