This book adopts a critical approach to today’s major workplace challenges. It turns traditional HRM on its head by placing workers’ perspectives towards the workplace alongside those of managers to create a comprehensive HRM textbook for the 21st century. We wrote it because – frankly – we got fed up with traditional textbooks that focus almost exclusively on procedural approaches to managing people within bureaucratic organisations from a managerial perspective.

Our new book, which is based on many years teaching, addresses the major workplace challenges of today. It adopts a coherent approach to topics by focusing on the way labour costs, productivity and survival fundamentally shape HRM policy and practice. It guides students through complex topics such as top-down managerialism, work intensification, insecurity and diversity, and integrates key issues that are overlooked in many textbooks, including conflict and resistance, the ‘new’ unitarism, the gig economy, migration and the challenges of Artificial Intelligence. It illustrates its points with numerous globally relevant examples and case studies to bring the subject to life.

Its critical approach will appeal to students taking undergraduate and postgraduate courses in HRM and the sociology of work, and indeed anyone with an interest in understanding how they are managed at work.

The book will be published on 6th September and can be pre-ordered from the Bristol University Press website here:

Bristol University Press | Where’s the ‘Human’ in Human Resource Management? – Managing Work in the 21st Century, By Michael Gold and Chris Smith