Abstract
While the field of human resource management (HRM) has a long research tradition, the focus on sustainability has only gained momentum since the turn of the millennium. This bibliometric review examined key documents that inform scholarship in sustainable human resource management (S-HRM). The review identified 807 Scopus-indexed documents on sustainability in human resource management published between 1982 and 2021. Bibliometric analyses applied to this database included document citation and co-citation analysis to map peer-recognized documents. The review documented an emerging knowledge base that is global in scope with contributions from a variety of regions in the world. Three ‘invisible colleges’ emerged in the visual map of co-cited documents. These include green human resource management (Green HRM) with a focus on environmental aspects of sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and S-HRM with a focus on analyzing all three aspects of the triple bottom line of corporate output. These document analyses found that this emerging literature on S-HRM is heavily weighted towards environmental concerns. The authors recommend that greater attention be placed on the contributions that HRM makes to the human and social aspects of sustainability.
Highlights
A recent meta-synthesis of research on sustainability in management found that scholarship on sustainable supply chain management achieved the highest citation impact while sustainable human resource management (S-HRM) evidenced the lowest [2]
Earlier bibliometric reviews conclude that the size of the knowledge base on S-HRM was small when compared with other management literatures in sustainability [1,2,3]
The knowledge base on S-HRM has seen an impressive increase in publications within the last few years
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The literature on managing for sustainability has grown substantially in the past 30 years [1,2]. This literature spans several management disciplines including supply chain management, knowledge management, strategic management, marketing, operations, and production. One field of practice that has received comparatively less interest from scholars is HRM [3]. A recent meta-synthesis of research on sustainability in management found that scholarship on sustainable supply chain management achieved the highest citation impact while sustainable human resource management (S-HRM) evidenced the lowest [2]
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