Is Strategic HRM Losing Its Way - and Possibly Its Identity? A Social Network Perspective

We provide a social network perspective on strategic human resource management (HRM) by conducting a bibliometric analysis of over 84,000 citations in top management journals from 1990 to 2016. Our review builds on prior narrative reviews and meta-analyses to show the four key stages in the evolution of strategic HRM. Early studies in strategic HRM focused on HRM practices and their effects on performance. Subsequently, theoretical arguments from the resource based view (RBV) were transferred into strategic HRM based on several key studies playing brokering roles. A practice-resources/capabilities-performance (P-R/C-P) perspective came to be at the core of strategic HRM and serve as the main organizing framework. More recently, the focus has been on research that looks at human capital as a strategic human asset. Using network analysis, we show that a new conversation is arising between the RBV and these more recent studies on strategic human capital, but this synthesis is for the most part divorced from earlier work that looked at HRM practices. In light of the turn away from examining HRM practices, we argue strategic HRM is losing its way and potentially its identity. We argue for taking strategic HRM back to its founding identity by bringing HRM practices back into the center of the conversation.