Human Resource Management: An International Comparative Perspective on the Employment Relationship.

There has been a proliferation of human resource management textbooks in recent years as lecturers, no doubt encouraged by publishers seeing such texts as the route to guaranteed bulk sales, have felt the urge to write up and circulate their lecture notes. Given such a spate of textbooks, the emergence of yet another one as reflected in the work of Hollinshead and Leat which looks at human resource developments in nine countries - Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and the USA - necessitates an evaluation of whether it has anything new to offer.

The emerging human resource management textbooks have sought to establish their distinctiveness in terms of substance, perspective and presentation. Substantively, newer texts generally have adopted either a "strategic HRM" approach, as illustrated by Saddler's book reviewed elsewhere in this volume, or sought to look at developments in other countries. A third and smaller group of texts have retained a domestic and traditional industrial relations or personnel management focus. Perspectives have varied along a continuum …