HRM in the transition states of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union

Abstract

An important question that has emerged in analyses of CEE HRM is the extent to which ‘Western’ theories and ‘best practices’ can be applied to the region, or whether there is evidence of a unique or hybrid approach to HRM emerging. This is a question that deserves attention, given the potential significance of many of these economies. In attempting to explore it and landscape developments in HRM in CEE, scholars do not have easy access to a mapping of existing research. In this chapter, we seek to provide such a mapping and identify under-researched issues for future investigation. We reviewed (mainly) empirical studies examining HRM in CEE and FSU countries. We conducted article title, abstract, and introduction searches in the most influential international HRM journals (Caligiuri, 1999; Hoobler & Brown Johnson, 2004). We supplemented this search with additional journals in situations where the focus of the research was on specific practices neglected in previous research (for example, outsourcing in Smith et al., 2006), where the research offered a focus on a country not well covered heretofore (for example, Serbia in Milikić et al., 2008; Romania in Dalton & Druker, 2012), or where the research offered the possibility of particular insight because of the unique research methods employed (e.g., Gurkov, 2002). We organise the results of our search around whether the studies examined build knowledge underscored by the basic nomothetic assumptions of the universalistic approach, or provide more idiographic, contextual knowledge linked with institutional idiosyncrasies.