AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING

CROSS-NATIONAL
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
Most work in comparative understanding of cross-national human
resource management (HRM) suggests that outcomes are shaped
either by fairly abstract individual values (the culturalist position,
e.g. Boxsol 1995, Hofstede 1980), or by the crystallisation of
contests of ideas held at national level by powerful actors
(the implied argument of most institutionalist work, c.f. Whitley
1999). Yet in spite of the fields reliance on ideational factors,
there has been little debate on how comparative HRM uses
systems of ideas- that is, observable or traceable patterns of
ideational factors - in explaining cross-national differences.
With the aim of contributing to theory, this paper has analyzed
the treatment of the ideational sphere in this strand of research,
focusing on the work published in the last decade by leading
journals in the HRM field. Our interest is in exploring both the
extent to which comparative studies of the management of
employment relationship have dealt with ideational factors, and
how they have integrated them into the explanatory
frameworks offered.
The paper is organised as follows.
first section describes the process by which papers were
selected for analysis, and how ideational factors were
identified.
The second section categorizes the predominant
comparative methodologies found in these papers,
particularly in terms of their strengths and weaknesses in
addressing the ideational domain.
The third section reviews the more limited number of
attempts, among our population of papers, to address

comparative issues relating to the ideational sphere more

directly.
These particularly concern issues of ideas and identity, and
matters relating to the production and international
transmission of contemporary ideas. Finally, the conclusion
summarizes the challenges comparative HRM faces in moving
towards a more adequate treatment of the ideational sphere.
Concepts and methodology
Our approach was to analyse how comparative studies of the
management of the employment relationship published in
leading journals over the past decade dealt with ideational
factors. We intended this analysis to be systematic rather
than an intuitive literature review. For the purposes of validity,
it is therefore important to set out in detail our own approach
and assumptions. The first issue is how we identified ideational
factors. We rejected the idea of building a strong model of how
ideas shape comparative HRM prior to conducting the review (a
theory testing approach) in favour of an approach which
allowed the findings to emerge from the data (a theory building
approach). Our approach was therefore relatively inductive.
This consisted of the identification of statements of
assumptions, hypotheses or propositions, and
conclusions, which made reference to ideational factors - by
which we mean non-material factors such as ideas, ideology,
norms, values, etc. - as well as processes relating to the
stability of, adjustment to, or change of dominant ideas, such
as legitimation. The basic question was whether, and how,
research made reference to such ideational factors, in
explaining cross-national differences. We concentrated on how
concepts around ideational factors had been deployed in the
research rather than on the terminology used. Ideational
factors were seen, ex ante, as capable of being portrayed as
either direct or proximate factors. That is, one might portray a
national difference directly as being the result of an ideational

difference (e.g. pay gaps are larger in the USA than in Sweden
because the former is a more individualistic, market-based
society), or as the result of ideational factors shaping
institutional differences, in turn shaping outcomes (e.g.
differences in the extent and level of collective bargaining,
shaped in part by historically embedded values on the
autonomy of individual employers, the rights of workers, etc.,
shape pay gaps). In either case, what we were looking for was
arguments about how and why differences in ideas at a
national level might shape HR outcomes, rather than simple
descriptive statements. For inclusion in our analysis, papers
had to meet two criteria:
To be explicitly cross-country comparative and with
national differences/similarities being either the primary,
or an important secondary, focus of investigation. This led
to the exclusion of a small number of papers with crossnational data where national factors were not a focus of
the research. It also led to the exclusion of large parts of
the literature on HRM within multinational corporations;
these were retained only where they actively compared
the management of HR in two or more host countries.
To be about HRM. Taking a wide definition of HRM, we
included comparisons of national employment systems as
well as firm/firm comparisons. Relevant theoretical and
methodological papers were also retained. We included
comparative studies of the management of industrial
relations (IR), as we see this as part of a broad definition
of HRM (Sisson 1990), but excluded (IR) papers that were
not directly related to the management of
the employment relationship, such as studies of trade
union organisation, peak-level corporatism, macro-level
employment statistics, etc.