Employee management activities can be sub-divided into practices, or techniques (Guest et al., 2004). For
example, selection (a „practice‟) can involve psychometric testing, interviews, assessment centres, etc
(techniques); contingent pay systems (a „practice‟) can include profit-sharing, gainsharing, and
performance-related pay (techniques). To avoid too great a variety, we opted for categorisation at the
„practices‟ level, which meant assigning particular HR techniques to one of our 26 general categories of
practice (Appendix 2). As a consequence, the eclectic findings reported below mask an even richer
diversity of possible interpretations of HRM. That said, our particular definition of HRM, and our set of
practice-level categories, mean that we depart from some authors‟ narrower definitions of HRM as having
nothing to do with, for example job design, industrial relations frameworks or quality systems.