Sixty years of research on technology and human resource management: Looking back and looking forward

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Ying Wang,Sunghoon Kim,Corine Boon
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22049
• Date: 01 January 2021

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Sixty years of research on technology and human resource

management: Looking back and looking forward

Sunghoon Kim

1

| Ying Wang

2

| Corine Boon

3

1

The University of Sydney Business School,

The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South

Wales, Australia

2

School of Management and Economics,

Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

3

Amsterdam Business School, University of

Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Correspondence

Ying Wang, School of Management and

Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology,

No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian

District, Beijing 100081, China.

Email: ltzlltzl@126.com

Abstract

Technology has changed the way we work and how companies manage their

employees. This article reviews 60 years of research on the relationship between

technology and human resource management, as represented in Human Resource

Management. Based on 154 articles, we identify recurring and evolving patterns of

research on technology across three time periods (separated by the advent of the

personal computer in 1977 and by the popularization of consumer internet services

in 1997), three perspectives on technology (tool, proxy, and ensemble view of tech-

nology), and three thematic streams (the impact of technology on jobs and organiza-

tions, the utilization of technology in HR activities, and the management of

technology workers). Drawing on patterns of research that emerged in the past, we

provide suggestions for future HR research on newly arriving technology.

KEYWORDS

Artificial intelligence, Human resource management, HR analytics, information systems,

technology

1|INTRODUCTION

Technology has changed the ways in which we work and the ways in

which companies manage their employees (Cascio &

Montealegre, 2016; Forman, King, & Lyytinen, 2014; Parker, Van den

Broeck, & Holman, 2017). Researchers in the field of human resource

management (HRM) have extensively investigated the implications of

technological changes and thereby provided valuable insights to

human resource (HR) practitioners, managers, and policymakers on

how to navigate their new realities. This article celebrates 60 years of

research on the relationship between technologies and HRM as repre-

sented in Human Resource Management (Management of Personnel

Quarterly, until 1971). Since 1961, this field-leading journal has exten-

sively published on technology and its implications for HRM. We

review this accumulated knowledge and search for patterns of

research that can inform future HR studies on emergent technology.

We build on and contribute to the literature in several ways.

First, we trace the development of HRM research on technology

in general rather than focusing on a single technological artifact (i.e., a

socially recognized bundle of material and cultural properties that is

created to achieve practical goals) of one particular generation. Sev-

eral reviews have covered the topic of HRM and technology with a

focus on specific technological artifacts such as e-HR (Marler &

Fisher, 2013; Strohmeier, 2007), information technology (IT) (Stone,

Deadrick, Lukaszewski, & Johnson, 2015), HR analytics (King, 2016;

Marler & Boudreau, 2017), Big Data (Garcia-Arroyo & Osca, 2019),

and algorithmic work (Cheng & Hackett, 2019). These reviews are cer-

tainly helpful for researchers who wish to advance the knowledge on

a particular technological phenomenon. However, they are of limited

use for future researchers who are likely to grapple with the different

technological artifacts that are newly emerging in their time. In this

review, we cover research on a broad range of technological artifacts

that appeared over the last 60 years (e.g., from electronic data

processing [EDP] in the 1960s to HR Analytics in recent years) to

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.22049

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identify periodic and persistent approaches to examining the subject

of technology and thereby generate insights for future research.

Second, we recognize the divergence in the epistemology of tech-

nology; HR scholars have adopted varied approaches in conceptualiz-

ing the phenomenon of technology. In organizing and categorizing

papers across different epistemologies of technology, we draw from

the three-fold conceptualization of technology—the tool view, the

proxy view, and the ensemble view—proposed by Orlikowski and

Iacono (2001) that was shown to be relevant for HRM (Charlier,

Guay, & Zimmerman, 2016). We examine how the three technology

conceptualizations were reflected in HR research over the years,

thereby providing perspectives on what types of questions we could

ask on the subject in the future.

Third, we identify three thematic streams on technology—tech-

nology-induced changes in jobs and organizations, utilization of new

technology in HR activities, and technology workers—that researchers

have focused on in Human Resource Management to date. We summa-

rize how these major themes were reiterated as well as how they have

evolved over time by embracing diverse epistemological approaches

to technology. By identifying enduring features of the accumulated

knowledge in the journal, we intend not only to illuminate what HR

scholars have done in the past but also to shed some light on what

HR researchers could do going forward when they encounter new

technologies in the future.

This review is based on technology-related articles published in

Human Resource Management between 1961 and 2019. We selected

the papers in three steps. First, we manually examined all issues to

identify major concepts and terminologies used in articles on the sub-

ject of technology. Second, by using EBSCO Business Source Ulti-

mate, we conducted keyword searches on titles, abstracts, and body

texts. The keywords included a range of technology-related terms

identified in the first stage, such as analytics, artificial intelligence (AI),

automation, big data, computer, data processing, digital, e-HR, e-learn-

ing, electronic, engineering, information system, IT, internet, metrics,

online, scientist, service center, software, technician, web, and virtual.

We excluded articles if the technology words were mentioned only in

the method section or footnotes. This search yielded a total of

188 articles. Third, two authors independently assessed the relevance

of the selected papers and then resolved any disagreements through

discussions. The articles were finally marked as highly relevant

(n= 87), moderately relevant (n= 67), and irrelevant (n= 34). Papers

were considered moderately relevant when a technology was

addressed but not as the core topic of the study and irrelevant when

technology-related words were mentioned only in passing without

providing meaningful insights into them. We excluded irrelevant arti-

cles and considered only articles of high and moderate rele-

vance (n= 154).

This review comprises three sections. The first section offers a

historical overview across three periods, marked by the advent of per-

sonal computers and by the popularization of consumer internet ser-

vices, and illustrates how HR researchers have followed the

technology discourse of their generation. The second section exam-

ines how the concept of technology was theorized in HR research. It

shows that HR scholars have embraced three conceptualizations of

technology: the tool view, the proxy view, and the ensemble view.

The third section identifies major thematic streams that emerged from

our review across different periods and different technology concep-

tualizations. By building on observed patterns in HR research on tech-

nology, we provide suggestions for future research.

2|A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF

TECHNOLOGY

The 60 years covered in this review overlapped with the era when the

word “technology”entered public discourse in the English-speaking

world. Although this word began to appear in the 17th century, it was

rarely utilized until the end of World War II (see the word frequency

trend in Figure 1). The phenomenon and objects we currently associ-

ate with technology were expressed in other terms such as invention,

machine, engineering, or industrial science (Schatzberg, 2018). Since

the early 1960s, technology has been elevated as everyday terminol-

ogy that is often juxtaposed with “innovation”and “change”

(Schatzberg, 2018). The past 60 years can be somewhat arbitrarily

partitioned into three periods divided by two landmarks: the introduc-

tion of the personal computer (1977) and the explosive growth of

consumer internet services (1997). These two events occurred at the

defining moments of the “computing revolution”and the “Internet

revolution”that profoundly reshaped the global technology industry

and the lives of many workers (Gordon, 2012).

In the first period up to 1976, mainframe computers began to

receive public attention (Campbell-Kelly & Garcia-Swartz, 2015). In

1962, IBM launched a project to develop a new type of computer

(360 series) that laid the foundation for its success in the following

decades. In 1968, Intel was established, and in 1971, it offered its first

microchip. This is the period when HR managers began to realize the

need for using computing technologies in managing employees. The

establishment of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity

(EEO) commission in 1964 and subsequent EEO legislations forced

companies to improve their personnel data management procedures

(Dobbin & Sutton, 1998). This inspired large corporations to consider

adopting EDP technologies to streamline the handling of personnel

data. This was also the time when HR managers had to consider

retraining workers in response to the risk of job displacements caused

by automation. In January 1965, Newsweek estimated that automation

was eliminating 35,000 American jobs per week.

The second period (1977–1996) is characterized by the arrival of

personal computers in 1977 (Apple II, PET, and TRS-80, all in the same

year) and their explosive growth in subsequent years with the intro-

duction of the IBM PC (Campbell-Kelly & Garcia-Swartz, 2015). The

growing affordability of computers allowed the development of

sophisticated management information systems (MISs) that influenced

the development of human resource information systems (HRIS)

(Bhuiyan, Chowdhury, & Ferdous, 2014). Another critical development

in this period is the advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) that

were featured in various technologies such as computer-aided design

230 KIM ET AL.