The increasing number of cross-border alliances and mergers both within Europe

The increasing number of cross-border alliances and mergers both within Europe and between Europe and other parts of the world have made it imperative for students of management to have a thorough understanding of the European context for human resource management (HRM). This is partly reflected in the increasing attention being paid by MBA programmes in Europe to cross-border management issues. Likewise, e.g. the Community of European Management Schools’ (CEMs) exchange programme and joint masters’programmes are further testimony to the growing emphasis leading European business schools are placing on broadening the outlook of their students. The aim is to develop graduates who are “fluent” in the many various environments, approaches and practices that exist across Europe for managing human resources. Our understanding of these approaches and practices is constrained by the limitations of the available knowledge. The chief of these, and the most common, relates to the lack of access to strictly comparable data encompassing a broad range of countries. However good the conceptual discussion of the issues involved in European HRM and however comprehensive the country descriptions, there is rarely any basis for making genuine cross-country comparisons. A related limitation is that, because of this, changes to HRM in Europe are often imputed to be taking place purely on the basis of anecdotal evidence. A final flaw is that many texts lack the necessary native expertise for each of the European countries they are dealing with. Ethnocentricity is the invariable result. The text offered here aims to redress these shortcomings. First, it employs comprehensive comparable representative data collected longitudinally during the last decade (the “Cranet” surveys: see Appendix 1 for details). It is thus able to address the typical organisation rather than just the contentiously named “leadingedge” companies or through stories based on small numbers of examples. It also draws directly on the expertise of leading HRM scholars within each of the countries covered by the text. Each chapter is written by leading scholars of HRM in those countries. In addition, our text presents entirely fresh analyses of HRM in Europe, based on new and hitherto unpublished data. Such an analysis is critically important for students and researchers – and, we would argue, also for practitioners – throughout Europe and wherever else in the world people want to understand European HRM. The approach is to explore the issues involved; to create comparisons between, mainly, pairs of countries using the same sets of tables from the same data; and to draw conclusions. Content The book is, consequently, divided into three parts. In Part 1 we introduce the concepts and theoretical issues associated with the convergence and divergence thesis in HRM. Are there trends in HRM which indicate that countries are moving close together in the way they manage their people? Assuming that there might be such a movement, is it towards a US model or can we see the development of a separate European model? Or is it the case that each country remains distinct in their HRM? These issues and their disparate underlying logics will be explored: they include HRM policies and practices in recruitment, the use of performance appraisals, the use of reward systems, flexibility in working patterns, training and development, employee involvement and industrial relations and the adaptations made by multinational companies in relation to different national environments. We go beyond simplistic analyses to argue that convergence may take place nationally, within regional blocs or across Europe as a whole. In Part 2, trends in relation to these issues will be discussed on the basis of in-depth comparisons between individual countries. These chapters are authored by experts from the relevant countries: they provide an insider’s view

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