It has been recognized from the earliest discussions of personnel administration and management that practice here has to be related to directly impinging environmental factors – such as labour markets and state legislation. Literature, perhaps, lagged rather behind practice. A paper at the end of the 1960s on the then dominant ‘human relations’ approach argued that the human relations literature of the immediate post-war years and the succeeding organization development and change literature ignored all external, economic variables (strauss 1968 ). The same critique could well be applied to much of the more prescriptive hrm literature. This could be shown as in figure 5.1.