The theory and practice of strategic HRM and participative management: Antecedents in early industrial relations

Abstract

Two central concepts in contemporary management research are strategic human resource management (SHRM) and participative management (PM). Most writers on these subjects portray them as relatively recent (post-1970s) developments in the industry and, in turn, trace their origin in the academic literature to the post-World War II writings of scholars, such as Kurt Lewin, Douglas McGregor, Chris Argyris, H. Igor Ansoff, and Michael Porter. This chronology is largely correct if attention is restricted to the academic field of management, but it misses important antecedent contributions in both theory and practice made several decades earlier by industrial relations academics and management practitioners. This paper describes these early antecedents and demonstrates that both the concept and practice of SHRM and PM were explicitly articulated and implemented in the 1920s, albeit in a different idiom and context than today.