HRM, Work and Employment in China
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Book reviews HRM, Work and Employment in China Fang Lee Cooke Routledge, London, 2005, xi, 236pp. ISBN: 0-415-32784-9 Asian Business & Management (2006) 5, 299–302. doi:10.1057/palgrave.abm.9200170
Among Chinese managers in China and on management education programmes outside China there appears to be a growing and more explicit interest in human resource management (HRM). Why is this? Were managers in Chinese organizations previously incapable of managing ‘human resources’, that is, managing employees? Perhaps there is growing recognition that Chinese organizations need more than cost advantages to stay globally competitive — they need to identify and harness talent more effectively. Will reference to ‘HRM’ (‘in the Western sense’, as emphasized in the cover blurb to this book) provide guidance in this endeavour? And what of the suggestion made by one of my Chinese graduate students in London that ‘HRM’ as a line of specialist management offers greater career opportunities for women than other management career paths in China? It is with such questions in mind that I turned to Fang Lee Cooke’s timely book. Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Employment Studies at Manchester Business School. The background to this book is given by her recognition of ‘the way patterns of employment relations are changing in China’, for example the ‘radical reforms of workplace welfare and social security provision’. It should be noted at the outset that the ‘China’ under discussion here is Mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan. In this context, the impact of restructuring among the country’s labour-intensive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is given as a powerful factor in shaping our understanding of the topics in the title. Similar attention is given to the impact of foreign ‘private sector’ investment in the form of international joint ventures and the influence of what can be seen as non-Chinese-style people management in the context of the multi-national corporations (MNCs), which now form an integral part of industrial and economic development in China. To these processes can be added the emergence of Chinese MNCs such as Haier and challenges to the established interpretations of HRM, work and employment that such developments imply. In addition, there is the phenomenon of increasing labour mobility across China, reinforcing a process of urbanization which may benefit potential high-flyers and entrepreneurs (ie in a convergent HRM sense), but appears to promise little security for the burgeoning class of migrant urban
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workers competing around a brutally fluid notion of a ‘minimum wage’ — a theme developed to startling effect in Chapter 7. The chapter headings give insight into the scope and structure of the discussion and analysis that the author develops: (Chapter 1) Introduction; (Chapter 2) Employment relations in China and its institutional context; (3) Reform and the personnel systems in the state sector; (4) Pay systems and recent remuneration schemes; (5) Vocational and enterprise training systems; (6
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