Yet on the other hand, it can also be argued that while the contingent workforce has grown, this evidences the ‘hard’ version of SHRM (the willingness
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to treat human resources as other resources and not to be fettered by long-standing practices). Alongside this, employment management in the core (and it has also been noted that short-term contract labour has remained at around 7 per cent of the workforce) is now routinely conceptualized in terms of SHRM assumptions, frameworks and logics rather more so than in terms of the erstwhile industrial relations paradigm of the 1960s–1980s. The inter-vening period has seen a whole series of movements (in theory and prac-tices) which are easily interpreted as expressive of, or even re-workings of, the SHRM framework. Key examples include: the learning organization, the resource-based view of the firm, the celebration of the importance of ‘knowl-edge workers’, investment in people, high performance work systems and so on. Perhaps most important of all, whether fully realized in practice or not, the idea that it is sensible for an organization in the public or private sector to view its people management in a strategic way is nowadays conventional wisdom.
So, given this pattern and climate of change at multiple levels, how should strategic human resource management be defined?