Theories and institutional approaches to HRM and employment relations in selected emerging markets

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in understanding the effects of institutions on people management and employment relations, applying frameworks of institutional analysis to explaining variations in the nature and practice of people management (Goergen et al. 2009; Brewster et al. 2012). The comparative employment relations and human resource management literature on mature developed economies has seen more use of institutional frameworks of analysis than has been the case in emerging markets. However, more recently there has been increasing interest in expanding the range of categorizations of national institutional archetypes to encompass emerging markets, and in deploying newly developed frameworks to compare differences in HR practice in such settings (Wood et al. 2010; Schneider 2009; Schneider and Karcher 2010; Wood and Frynas 2006). In this chapter, we highlight the different ways in which national institutional frameworks may be understood from an emerging market perspective, and the impact of different institutional frameworks on the practice of HRM and employment relations. There is considerable difference and diversity between and within most emerging markets; some characterized by fluid and loosely coupled institutional arrangements and the relatively well developed BRICS countries, which have more complex institutions and more sophisticated labour markets. The opening sections of this chapter consider ‘non-BRICS’ countries; we then explore variations in the BRICS countries in more depth.