Other countries have been more resistant to the notion of HRM, either taking it
up as a concept much later or staying with the ‘personnel management’ label. It
is notable, for example, that the European and the world professional bodies still
call themselves, respectively, the European Association of Personnel Management
and the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations. This is not
a question of backwardness: the New Zealand association is one of the most
modern, but still uses the Personnel Management title. In many cases, the 1990s
and the first decade of the twenty-first century saw academics and consultants in
a country taking up the term while practitioners in the same country remained
stubbornly attached to ‘personnel’ as the title of their area of work.