GUEST EDITORS’ NOTE: TIME TO RECONNECT THE SILOS? SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS AND HUMAN RESOURCES

Abstract

n the last decade, there have been some strong critiques of research and practice in the area of human resources (see, e.g., Delbridge & Keenoy, 2010; Kaufman, 2012; Kochan, 2004; Thompson, 2011). What these authors have in common is their desire for research that focuses on the man agement of people in the workplace to be relevant. But relevance changes, just as how we work and where we work have changed significantly in recent decades. Thirty years ago, manual jobs made up more than half of the workforce (Lambert, 2010). It has been a long time since manufacturing has been the industry of focus and the male breadwinner the main employee group under consider ation within scholarly research. The global labor market has quadrupled in size in the last 20 years (Lambert, 2010), bringing with it a range of issues for HR practitioners and scholars to contend with. Equally, we have much greater interest in the interface of work and leisure and how one pervades the other. This special issue seeks to understand the changing world of work in an era of significant social, economic, and technological change and to bridge the gap between research, practice, and policy. Key issues for the future of employment relations (ER)1 include how to balance the imperatives for efficiency, quality, and high performance so that the needs of employees can also be met (Wilkinson & Townsend, 2011).