Globalisation and IHRM: partners in comparative perspective?

Globalization may be interrogated from several angles: its implicit grounding in unitarist and neoliberal ideology; its status in relation to socially embedded institutions and its assumed universalism and run away power. Human resource management as an international discipline is an emerging area of academic study. Comparative analysis facilitates attempts to distinguish the essential from the accidental, the simple from the complex, the primary from the derived. Comparative variation in the ways academic commentators approach the concept of globalization and the consequences for people management and development, may profitably be evaluated heuristically. Alternative perspectives are presented to compare and contrast the ways in which scholars are interpreting globalization and its consequences for investment in human capital, theoretically and in practice. The article contributes to scoping the empirical research agenda emerging from such considerations, giving rise to implications for those involved in trans-national training and development.