A wide-ranging research project covering change and its implementation in 27 companies provides the opportunity to reassess the meaning and significance of HRM. It is suggested that it is too simple to dismiss HRM as "old wine in new bottles." Rather, they find important changes taking place. But the true significance of HRM, it is suggested, lies not in the fact that its practice actually does resolve underlying tensions but rather in its capacity to manage these by reducing, suppressing and glossing them. HRM itself is an outcome of the tensions in the employment relationship and, perhaps not surprisingly therefore, it continues to express them.