Human Resource Management in the Multinational Enterprise: Styles, Modes, Institutions and Ideologies

In their pioneering text Human Resource Management in the Multinational Company, Robert Desatnick and Margo Bennett (1977) advise that ‘If the right man is hired and properly trained to manage the foreign subsidiary, the corporate parent need not worry; but periodic audits are always advisable. His training should be concentrated at the operating company level, within US or Europe’ (p. 114). Even twenty years ago the wording of this prescription might have seemed a little archaic. Yet even if the authors had substituted Japan or Korea as the subjects of their own ethnically and sexually biased discourse they would, perhaps, have not been far from an accurate description of human resource management (HRM) practice in parent enterprises today.