'Making Sense' of Human Resource Management in China

Economy, Enterprises and Workers

Malcolm Warner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317987567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This edited work attempts to 'make sense' of recent developments in the field of Human Resource Management in the People's Republic of China. It attempts to see how the paradoxes and contradictions engendered by contemporary Chinese society are being resolved in the enterprises and workplaces of the Middle Kingdom. The book starts with an overview of the literature, then follows with a selection of micro -oriented, concerned with topics like recruitment and retention, then macro -oriented empirical studies, a number of the latter dealing with strategic as well as performance issues, with last, those comparing sets of societal cultural values. It attempts a synthesis of what has emerged from recent research on the 'harmonious society'.

These contributions from authors based in universities in eight countries, in Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, United Kingdom and USA, cover a wide range of research on HRM, from the micro - to the macro -. Six of them teach and/or research at campuses on the Mainland. Their empirical, field-based research covers the last half-decade and presents a robust picture of both what practitioners have adopted and how researchers have tried to 'make sense' of what they have investigated.

This book was based on a special issue of Intl Journal of Human Resource Management.

'Making sense' of HRM in China: setting the scene¹

Malcolm Warner
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

This contribution, as a part of a wider symposium, sets out to 'make sense' of Chinese human resource management (HRM) as it has evolved over the past three decades, by discussing seven paradoxes of its emergence over the past decades. The paradox categories discussed include: Western/Eastern; capitalist/socialist; ideological/non-ideological; advanced/transitional; global/glocal; multinational/national; and last, individualistic/collectivistic. The essay concludes that a number of the paradoxes appear to be stronger than others — even if there is more convergence in some categories than in others, due to the ongoing dynamic changes which are occurring in China's economy and society. But it is clear that their characteristics are still in flux, some relatively, some absolutely.

Introduction

'Making sense' of the Middle Kingdom in general has rarely been unproblematic. As the late Lucian Pye (1990) observed: 'The starting point for understanding the problem is to recognize that China is not just another nation-state in the family of nations. China is a civilization pretending to be a state. The story of modern China could be described as the effort by both Chinese and foreigners to squeeze a civilization into the arbitrary, constraining framework of the modern state, an institutional invention that came out of the fragmentation of the West's own civilization. Viewed from another perspective, the miracle of China has been its astonishing unity. In Western terms the China of today is as if the Europe of the Roman Empire and of Charlemagne had lasted until this day and were now trying to function as a single nation-state' (1990, p. 62).

Making sense of 'matters Chinese', in particular, is also not without its problems, as we shall see in this symposium. Over the millennia, China has undergone many, many transformations. The history of its civilization has been an unending dialectical process of change, with its recurrent ups and downs; it has constituted a highly turbulent narrative. In the last century alone, it saw the collapse of the Imperial Order, a Civil War and a Communist Revolution. Within the last half century, since the Liberation in 1949, it also took in the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and most recently, the Economic Reforms, all of which have turned the world of the average Chinese worker upside-down. And the latter sequence is but a short pace in what we may call the Long March of Chinese history.

After the death of the late 'Great Helmsman' Mao Zedong in 1976, China was to turn the page. Its transformation from 'command-' to 'market-' economy after 1978 led in turn to a wave of management reforms and within this phenomenon, the onset of human resource management (HRM) (renli ziyuan guanli) — albeit 'with Chinese characteristics' (juyou Zhongguo tese). While a great deal has already been published on the latter over the past decade or so and a considerable amount of research has been generated, the debate is ongoing. Much of this earlier work has, however, been mainly descriptive and, in the opinion of the present writer, insufficiently analytical and lacking in theoretical rigour (see Warner 2008, 2009). As far as many writers on the subject are concerned, their use of the term 'HRM' has been often relatively uncritical, although with a number of major exceptions (see Child 1994; Warner 1995; Zhao 1995; Cooke 2005; Zhu 2005, for example). We hope to remedy this in the observations set out below in the symposium of which this essay is a part.

Chronology and context

First of all, the chronology and context of the debates around this form of people-management are both decidedly important. Once upon a time, before the late Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms took shape around three decades ago, the discussion of this genre of management in the PRC was a more or less straightforward form of discourse. For many years, at least within the context of the Soviet-style 'iron rice bowl' (tie fan wan) established in the early 1950s ( see Kaple 1994), Personnel Management (renshi guatili) was the main prop of any discussion on the topic, both in terms of theory and practice. However, by the mid-1980s, as the economic reforms gathered momentum and the early personnel reforms appeared, the terminology used by commentators and practitioners turned to a new set of concepts.

Progress in Chinese civilization, in its culture, science and technology respectively has, as many historians have observed, evolved pragmatically over the centuries, with its development strongly empirical and said to be less dependent on theory than was the case in the West (see Needham 1954; Ronan 1978-1995: Finlay 2000: Winchester 2008).² It is also arguable in more recent times that this was also the case with economics and management, which were to arise from their specific cultural contexts, arguably without having or indeed needing a 'Chinese' theoretical base as such, as had also been the case in Japan (see Morris-Suzuki 1989). There is indeed an ongoing, as yet unresolved, discussion at the time of writing as to whether the field needs a 'Chinese theory of management' anyway, as opposed to a 'theory of Chinese management' (Editors Forum 2009; see Tsui 2009). Vis a vis this discussion, we can argue that a specifically 'Chinese' theory of economics did not in fact arise and this did not present significant problems (Trescott 2007) and therefore, as a generalization, an indigenous theory of management may not be a necessary or sufficient condition for an understanding of how national systems of management work. But it may be too early to say.

There had been great interest in pragmatism as a philosophical approach in the early decades of the last century, especially in the work of the late John Dewey of Columbia University who had influenced Chinese thinkers at the time (see Wan 2003; Ching 2008). There was also to be a close connection between Pragmatism and Marxism in interwar China. But the latter ideology was to dominate for many years after this. Later, when Deng launched his reform programme in the late 1970s, it was widely described as 'pragmatic'.³ It included in turn a number of changes which relate to what is currently understood in the PRC as 'people-management' in its modern guise, as we have made explicit in an earlier overview of the field (Warner 2008) using terms like labour-markets (laodongli shichang), integral to this demarche, all in order to optimize 'factor-productivity' - a World Bank inspired 'buzz-word' at the time.

Few now dispute that one of the significant weaknesses of a command economy was the wasteful use of labour and rigidities in its deployment. Reforms were to be needed in all the productive economic domains, that is, capital, land and labour. While the planned economy had been an inheritance of the period of Soviet influence, the Chinese version was no way as extensive as that found in the USSR (see Kaple 1994). The 'Open Door' (kaifang) and 'Four Modernizations' (sige xiandaihua) policies initiated by Deng were the first steps in breaking the mould. The resultant labour reforms were to be a key part of this demarche (see Korzec 1992)

Contending and opposing tendencies, even contradictions, were already building up in this 'transitional economy', as they had in other former 'command economies' around the world (see Warner, Edwards, Polansky, Pucko and Zhu 2005). Social security dependency was to be replaced with market-oriented reform; out with the 'old' and in with the 'new', both in theory and practice. The old 'iron rice bowl' (tie fan wan) model rooted in the work-units (danwei) of the State-owned enterprises (SOEs) was now to be phased out - and a more market-based version introduced incrementally and pragmatically, as we have already noted elsewhere in previous writings on the topic (see Warner 1995, 2005, 2008). The 'name of the game' was to change but the new rules were to prove confusing to many. Market signals were to replace fiat as the economic reforms diffused (see Nolan 2003). A new form of people-management, renli ziyuan guanli, literally meaning 'labour force resources management', became — for good or ill — a synonym for what was to be understood as HRM (see Warner 2008). Whether something was 'lost in translation' is another matter.⁴

We must at this point examine the theoretical underpinnings of this new usage in the PRC and its degree of precision in its general usage. To put the proposed changes into context, we must grasp that at the time there was a general rush to learn from the West and to adapt overseas practices as quickly as possible. Again, as had been the case in the 1950s, there was a race towards 'modernization'. We must here take a brief look at the macro-framework which the Chinese deployed into which the HRM debate can be placed. A fashionable notion at the time — 'Linking up with the international track' (yu guoji jiegui) — had emerged in the PRC in the late 1980s (Wang 2007, pp. 13ff) - and may be seen as an intrinsic part of how the PRC has tried to adapt to 'globalization', on the one hand, but at the same time emphasize 'Chinese characteristics' in order to be seen as retaining its own values, on the other.⁵ We shall see later in this study how attempts to 'square the circle' became de rigueur in the attempts to synthesize Western and Chinese values.

The upshot was a 'hybrid' model of people-management which combined elements of both, as indeed was the case not only in the PRC but also throughout Asia generally, as myself and colleagues have previously concluded (see Zhu, Warner and Rowley 2007). As another commentator notes: 'Examining various studies on China, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, (they) conclude that the people-management system in these countries is one of a hybrid model, combining aspects from the US and European models with what had already existed in these countries ... Western models are likewise influenced by Asian aspects of managing people' (see Galang 2008, p. 5).

Adopting a foreign model was, once again, on the agenda in China, with its leaders looking for guidance abroad, as they has done before in its modernization process a hundred years earlier. While in the 1950s, the slogan had been 'let's be Soviet, let's be modern' (xiang sulian moshi xuexi, sixian xiandaihua), in the 1980s this policy of 'linking up with the international track' was transformed into at times an uncritical admiration for mainly American management. However, as several Western writers on Chinese management have noted (see Child 1994; Warner 1995, 2005, 2008, for example) great caution should be exercised in interpreting how far HRM had been adopted into Chinese enterprises in practice, in the early years of the reforms at least. However, since it is almost three decades since the reforms were introduced, perhaps a greater understanding of what is involved in HRM has been achieved, how a more pragmatic form of the genre has bedded down and what limitations regarding its diffusion must be considered. A later section will give a flavour of what has been achieved in ongoing research in the field in the PRC.

Dimensions of HRM terminology

We must, at this juncture, come to grips with a number of, albeit problematic, dimensions of HRM terminology, its discourse and its terms of reference (see Figure 1). The first is linguistic, which refers to when the term comes into either academic or practitioner usage (or both) whether in theory or in practice, as a number of commentators have noted (see Zhu 2005, for instance). Alas, in too many cases and for a long period, the usage is that such management only appears to be in name alone. The second dimension is token, that is, when HRM practices appear in a minimally recognizable form in Chinese enterprises and is identifiable as such (see Cooke 2005). The third is substantive, namely where what is implemented in the Chinese context is sufficiently recognizable as HRM (see Warner 2008). It may be here hastily taken up because it is a 'fashionable' term and appears to be essentially 'modern'. HRM may also be surmised to operate at a 'mythic level in its Chinese usage, implying something is true but may be as yet unproven. But, as we shall see later, substantive use increases over time and is increasingly found today in large, 'learning' organizations, particularly those associated with what have been called 'Super-HRM' practices ( ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 'Making sense' of HRM in China: setting the scene
• 2 A critical review of human resource management studies (1978—2007) in the People's Republic of China
• 3 Network-based recruiting and applicant attraction in China: insights from both organizational and individual perspectives
• 4 Perceived human resource management practices and intention to leave of employees: the mediating role of organizational citizenship behaviour in a Sino-Japanese joint venture
• 5 Employee tenure and the nationality of joint ventures in China
• 6 The effect of aligning organizational culture and business strategy with HR systems on firm performance in Chinese enterprises
• 7 High-performance work systems, organizational commitment, and the role of demographic features in the People's Republic of China
• 8 High performance work practices and firm performance: evidence from the pharmaceutical industry in China
• 9 Multinational corporations and employment relations in the People's Republic of China: the case of Beijing Hyundai Motor Company
• 10 Effects of inter- and intra-hierarchy wage dispersions on firm performance in Chinese enterprises
• 11 Comparing the attitudes toward money, material possessions and savings of overseas Chinese vis-à-vis Chinese in China: convergence, divergence or cross-vergence, vis-à-vis 'one size fits all' human resource management policies and practices
• 12 Confucian dynamism, culture and ethical changes in Chinese societies - a comparative study of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong
• Index