Atkinson’s seminal work was entitled “Manpower strategies for flexible organisations” and this strategic level of HR is identified by authors such as Wood (1988) as a key issue for society, mirroring as it did the thesis of ‘flexible specialisation’ forwarded by Piore and Sabel (1984). Unfortunately there has been little attempt to attach a theoretical approach to the decision to sub-contract.
However, the literature on ‘HRM as strategic’ fails entirely to identify this kind of strategy and instead concentrates on the ‘core’ workers, on HRM’s commitment, best practice and strategic performance without reference to the periphery or the process of implementing such a strategy.
In looking at this HRM literature, some clear problems emerge. Firstly, the literature in inconsistent and its terminology is vague, leading to problems of identifying variables accurately and to issues of their subsequent measurement.
The confusion of terms continues in the literature: ‘high-performance work practices’ ‘high performance work systems’, ‘high-commitment HRM’, ‘high-involvement HRM’, ‘best practice or high-commitment HRM’ are terms used by different authors to describe the same thing- a strategy of increasing productivity through people.
Marchington and Wilkinson (2002: 202) conclude that ‘practices’ are ill-defined, while Guest et al 2000a found no consistency in ‘bundles’ of HRM practices in the Workplace Employee Relations Survey and resorted to counting the number of ‘practices’ individually to ‘find’ this ‘high commitment HRM’. Additionally, most results are from self-reports and cross-sectional studies which must, as Guest admits, be taken with caution (Guest et al 2000b:7-80).