The Concept of Strategic European Human Resource Management

This book is about developments in the area of Human Resource Management (HRM) in public and private organisations in European countries. The basic data used for the chapters in this book were collected within the Cranfield Network on European Human Resource Management (Cranet-E). What was originally called the Price Water-house Cranfield Project and began in 1989 with five countries is now a research network consisting of 20 European and five non-European countries trying to analyse HRM issues in a national, cross-national and (quasi-)longitudinal way. The network, which is co-ordinated by the Centre for European Human Resource Management at Cranfield School of Management in the UK, consists of HRM experts from a leading business school or university department in each of the participating countries. Further details can be found at the web-page of Cranet-E (http ://www.tu-dresden.de/wwbwlpew/cranfield/index.htm). These colleagues work together to collect comparable data from the senior Human Resources (HR) person in a representative cross section of organisations in each country in order to analyse and understand the similarities and differences they identify in that data. So far there have been four major rounds of the survey with more countries involved in each round: over 20 000 responses have been collected including over 6000 in the latest round. Full details of this research are given in Part VI on ‘Research in Comparative Human Resource Management’ and we have avoided repeating these details here or in any of the other chapters. Table 1.1 highlights the history and the development of Cranet-E.