Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry

Preface

Preface I started my academic career in the late 1970s as a more-or-less traditional labor economist, but then a decade later started to become interested in the historical side of the subject. A major impetus came in 1989 when I was asked to teach a new course entitled “Evolution of Thought and Practice in Personnel and Employment Relations.” The objective of the course was to cover the historical development of major ideas and events in the two allied fields of human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations (IR). Here was a teaching challenge , since I knew little about either, particularly the HRM part. This assignment sent me off on a journey of historical scholarship which has yet to end. The first product was a 1993 book, The Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States. Almost a decade later it was followed up with a companion volume, The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations, which charted the historical development of the IR field across the world. Having covered the history of industrial relations, I suppose it was inevitable that I would at some point turn to the HRM side. This was not my original plan, however, and when a decade ago I was invited to write a handbook chapter on the history of HRM, I declined for lack of expertise and interest. But never say never, and around 2000 my interests in both the theory and history of HRM began to develop. The result was a modest stream of articles, chapters, and an edited book that explored the historical origins and evolution of personnel/HRM. The more I researched and wrote on the history and concept of HRM, the more I discovered still remained to be done on the subject . In particular, and to my initial surprise, I found that extant treatments had missed or omitted important parts of the story, that the conventional x Preface wisdom among HRM/IR scholars about the origins of the HRM field is in places skewed and misinterpreted, and that a wealth of primary and secondary sources on the early history of HRM had yet to be tapped. Out of these considerations grew this book and what will end up being a companion book of historical case studies on early HRM. About two years ago I decided to give the history of HRM a full and in-depth treatment. When I start off on these historical projects I never quite know what direction they will take and what findings and conclusions will come forth; as much as possible I simply let the written record tell the story, of course with some judicious synthesis and interpretation and lots of mining for new and neglected data sources. This book is no different. At the beginning I had a basic outline for the volume and sense for the main drift of the content, but looking back I am nonetheless surprised to see just how many large bare and fuzzy spots were actually on my literary canvas. Even after a good deal of background reading in conventional secondary sources, I remained largely unaware of the major influence that developments such as systematic management, civil service reform, and industrial safety movements played on HRM, while the influence of other factors such as the vocational guidance movement and the Army personnel classification project in World War I were only partially perceived . Also largely unknown to me, but extremely interesting and informative to read, were the numerous eyewitness accounts and evaluations by foreign visitors and delegations of the welfare capitalism experiment during the 1920s. I am certain people who are full-time labor and business historians are already well aware of many of these things, but it is nonetheless the case that these and several other dimensions of the early history of HRM have to date remained largely absent from the most popular and widely read historiographies of the field. There is more. I discovered as I went along that a good deal of the secondary literature regarding the origins and early years of the HRM function in American industry not only suffers from holes and gaps but, perhaps more seriously, from a rather biased interpretation. The in-depth historical studies on the early days of labor management, such as by Nelson and Jacoby, get closest to the truth, in my estimation, but accounts by writers in industrial relations, the labor process school, and—most surprisingly—the human resource management field itself are in a...