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This book chronicles the birth and early development of what was originally called personnel management (PM) and industrial relations (IR), but which today is widely known as human resource management (HRM). HRM and its predecessors have an intellectual and vocational side: in the former case they comprise an area of scientific research and university teaching, in the latter they represent an area of management practice and consulting in companies , government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Today human resource management is widespread, firmly established, and the subject of a voluminous academic and practitioner literature. Nearly every medium- to large-size organization in the United States and other industrial economies has a formal human resource department that handles the plethora of services and programs pertaining to employees: recruitment, selection, compensation, benefits, training, and labor relations. Often these are large undertakings with dozens and even hundreds of staff and multimillion dollar budgets. Likewise, the practitioner-oriented association, Society for Human Resource Management, has over 200,000 members, and in the academic world hundreds of American universities and colleges offer specialized degrees and majors in HRM. Correspondingly, textbooks, research journals, and course offerings abound. But it was not always so. Less than a century ago the concept of human resource management had yet to be invented, and the practice of HRM was crude and primitive. The handling of employees was one part of the general management chores of the owner and lower-level department heads and foremen; was conducted without special training, written policies, or much planning; and by today’s standards was often performed in a harsh, arbitrary, and counterproductive manner. No 1 Early Human Resource Management: Issues and Themes 2 Managing the Human Factor business firm had a human resource department in the modern sense, and no university offered instruction in the subject. In certain respects this is an amazing situation. Consider, for example, that at the turn of the twentieth century mega-size firms and industrial plants were already well established and spreading rapidly. Each day over 8,000 employees reported for work at the Broad Street shops of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, and the United States Steel Corporation—then the largest company in the world—faced the challenge of managing over 160,000 people scattered across dozens of mills and facilities. Further, by this time large companies had evolved the basics of line and staff organization, were increasingly led by a professional cadre of salaried executives and managers, and had carved out separate management functions in the areas of operations, finance, accounting, and sales. So one is led to ask two questions: First, how could these companies manage such a huge agglomeration of employees without a specialized human resource management function? And second, what led some of them to change course and create such a function in the management hierarchy and others to stay with the traditional informal and decentralized HRM system? Accompanying the second question are related issues of interest. For example, where and when did the early human resource departments originate, how were they structured, what programs and activities did they implement, and how did they evolve in breadth and depth of function over time? Finally, one is led also to consider the parallel introduction of HRM in universities and ask such questions as: When and where did these university human resource programs first start? What subject matter was taught to students? And who among the university faculty were the prime movers in this new area of teaching and research? I provide evidence on all of these questions in this book, with most emphasis on the world of practice in industry. The time period covered starts with the mid-1870s and ends at 1933. The beginning date coincides with the depression of the 1870s and the outbreak of the Great Railway Strike of 1877. This strike, which spread across numerous states and resulted in tremendous violence and property destruction, was the first of its kind in American industry and effectively marked the emergence of a significant-sized industrial wage-earning workforce and the beginning of what soon became the nation’s number one domestic policy concern: the labor problem. The end year 1933 marks a huge inflection point in the field of PM/IR (hereafter abbreviated PIR) and the transition from the largely nonunion HRM model of welfare capitalism of the 1920s to the mass unionism and HRM model of collective bargaining spawned by the events and policies of the Great Depression and New Deal. What Is...

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