Concepts, contexts, and mindsets: Putting human resource management research in perspectives

• Date: 01 January 2018
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Author: Fang Lee Cooke
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12163

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PROVOCATION PAPER

Concepts, contexts, and mindsets: Putting human

resource management research in perspectives

Fang Lee Cooke

Monash Business School, Monash University

Correspondence

Fang Lee Cooke, Monash Business School,

Monash University, 26 Sir John Monash Drive,

Caulfield East, VIC 3145 Melbourne, Australia.

Email: fang.cooke@monash.edu

Funding information

Australian Research Council, Grant/Award

Number: LP1120275

Abstract

Why is context important in human resource management (HRM)

research? What and how contextual factors may be studied when

investigating an organisational phenomenon? Against a positivist

trend of decontextualisation in HRM research, this paper addresses

these questions by situating them in an international context. It

argues that context is important in making sense of what is

happening at workplaces in order to provide relevant solutions. It

also outlines three layers of context and draws on an empirical story

to illustrate how the utilisation and conceptualisation of context

may be underpinned by the researcher's intellectual and social

upbringing and theoretical orientation. The paper calls for more

qualitative studies to redress the imbalance in HRM research. It also

calls for a more open‐minded, inductive, and inclusive approach to

indigenous research that may present very different contexts, ways

of contextualising, and knowledge paradigms from the dominant

discourses prevailing in HRM research.

KEYWORDS

Asia, context, corporate social responsibility, internationalHRM,

multinational company, work‐life balance

1|INTRODUCTION

Over the past two decades, management scholars have become more like hedgehogs: focused on narrowly

specified research questions, and applying a clearly defined, highly sophisticated research methodology

(Meyer, 2014: 374).

The trend of decontextualisation in research on organisational behaviour (OB) and human resource management

(HRM) at the firm and individual level in the past two decades is undoubtedly discernible (e.g., Jackson, Schuler, &

Jiang, 2014; Kaufman, 2015). This is perhaps not surprising given the dominance of the U.S. paradigm in management

and organisation research, which has been traditionally biased toward the generation of universal, general, or

context‐free knowledge (Rousseau & Fried, 2001). Although micro‐level HRM studies that are increasingly having

an OB focus might have become less sensitive to context as critics have observed, research in the international

Received: 8 December 2016 Revised: 5 June 2017 Accepted: 5 June 2017

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12163

Hum Resour Manag J. 2018;28:1–13. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltdwileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj 1