Political [Personnel] Economy –a Political Economy Perspective to Explain Different Formsof Human Resource Management Strategies

What are the reasons behind the different human resource management strategies –human resource management strategies understood as patterns of action for “dealingwith” the human resources or the work force of an organization? Why do we on onehand have human resource management strategies, where the majority of employeeshave a long-term employment contract with the organization (up to a “life-long” employmentguarantee), and where good working and wage conditions prevail, while onthe other hand there are certain strategies that are characterized primarily by veryshort-term employment contracts and are frequently associated with poor workingconditions and relatively low wages? Economic approaches to an explanation trace theorigin of the different human resource management strategies back to the actors’ –primarily the employers’ – aspirations for efficiency. Often neglected here are the differencesin power between the employer and employee, but also other political aspectsof the exchange between “capital” and “labour”. In this article, I suggest a PoliticalEconomy Perspective as an explanatory approach (see also Nienhüser 2002). For this approach,I resort mainly to considerations of power and exchange theory that exhibitparallels to microeconomic approaches, in particular from the realm of institutionaleconomics, but I also pull from thoughts from the neo-Marxian labour process concepts.[...]