Abstract
New institutionalism increasingly informs work on comparative human resource management (HRM), downplaying power and how competing logics play out, and potentially providing an incomplete explanation of how and why ‘HRM’ and associated practices vary in different national contexts. We examine HRM in Pakistan’s banking industry and assess how managers’ espoused views of HRM practices reflect prevailing ones in dominant HRM models, and how they differ from early-career professionals’ perceptions of these practices. The cultural script of ‘seth’ (a neo-feudalist construction of authority) influences managers’ implementation of HRM policies and competes with the espoused HRM logic. We argue that managers will pursue a ‘seth’ logic when managing employees, as it reproduces existing power differentials within companies. By doing so, they render HRM unrecognizable from dominant models. Indeed, by using the term ‘HRM’, much of the existing, new institutionalism-influenced literature rationalizes a particular view of organizations and management that is inappropriate and analytically misleading in emerging economies.
Highlights
Studies that seek to explain how human resource management (HRM) varies across countries often adopt one or other perspectives from new institutionalism in organizational analysis (Gooderham et al, 1999; Lewis et al, 2019; Paauwe and Boselie, 2003, 2007), typically incorporating wider social and cultural scripts into their analysis (Paauwe, 2004)
We argue that new institutional analyses of HRM within emerging-economy firms (1) downplay the role of interests in how managers manage their employees; (2) apply the label ‘HRM’ to employee management; and (3) implicitly assume that managers implement practices associated with dominant HRM models
The first establishes that HR/senior managers espouse models of HRM that conform to dominant models; we provide evidence for the existence of seth culture as manifested through employees’ perceptions of HRM practices which clash with the espoused ones
Summary
Studies that seek to explain how human resource management (HRM) varies across countries often adopt one or other perspectives from new institutionalism in organizational analysis (Gooderham et al, 1999; Lewis et al, 2019; Paauwe and Boselie, 2003, 2007), typically incorporating wider social and cultural scripts into their analysis (Paauwe, 2004). Studies cannot explain what HRM and its associated sets of organizational practices are in different national contexts. We build on Brewster’s (2004: 371) insight that national culture is an integral part of HRM and is not an antecedent to it. This perspective contrasts with new institutionalism’s view of culture as an independent variable (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991: 8–9), as something that: (1) is distinct from actors and (2) has negligible material consequences. We examine the interplay between culture and actors to examine power and actors’ concerns to reproduce existing hierarchies within organizations
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
