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04 / 13 personalquarterly
of my colleagues to develop our own secret language, most of
HRM is easily understandable and easily explicable to anyone.
And yet, there remains so much about HRM and so much about
the context of various countries that we do not yet understand.
The main task at present seems to me to increase our know-
ledge about how much, and in what way, context affects HRM
and how much room is left to maneuver for the parties involved
(and for me that means all the stakeholders).
And as if that was not enough, I get to meet and to work with
really nice, really smart and really knowledgeable people from
all over the world. What could be better?
PERSONALquarterly:
In general, how can practitioners benefit from
IHRM research? Which advices would you give practitioners
to profit from IHRM research? If it is your task to make IHRM
research persuasive for practitioners, what would you say?
Brewster:
That’s a great question to end with. My career has
been as an HRM specialist, but I spent the first half of it as a
practitioner and only the second half as an academic. I have to
be honest and say that I am much less exercised about persua-
ding practitioners than many of my colleagues. My interest is
in understanding and much less in trying to be useful! Anyway,
although I believe that the academic/practitioner gap is a pro-
blem and that academics are partly to blame for that with their
jargon and their focus on impressing other academics, I also
think that the practitioners have a major responsibility here.
Many of them really read very little and many of them rely on
consultants to, often rather poorly, filter out the academic lear-
ning and present it to them. That is why practitioners continue
to do things that we academics know are either a waste of time
or even reduce the cost-effectiveness of their HRM. Personally, I
do a lot of teaching of practitioners and still work with a number
of organizations as an advisor. I find that if you present your
research findings clearly and simply and allow people time to
think about how they can be applied to their own organization,
many practitioners are very happy to be persuaded.
By now you’ll have guessed that I have no solutions that every-
one should adopt: everything depends on context. The impor-
tant message is to make sure that you deeply understand the
context of your organization.
PROF. CHRIS BREWSTER
Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK
E-Mail:
Chris Brewster is Professor of International Human Resource Ma-
nagement at the Henley Business School, University of Reading,
UK, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL and Vaasa University, Fin-
land. He had substantial experience in trade unions, government,
specialist journals, personnel management in construction and air
transport and in consultancy, before becoming an educator and
trainer. Chris Brewster has consulted with many major internati-
onal companies and international organizations such as the UN
and the EU and taught on management programmes throughout
the world. He is a frequent international conference speaker. He
has conducted extensive research in the field of international and
comparative HRM; written or edited more than two dozen books,
including, recently, „International Human Resource Management“
and a „Handbook of Research on Comparative Human Resource
Management“ and over 175 articles. In addition to his PhD from
the LSE and honorary doctorate from the University of Vaasa in
Finland, in 2002 Chris Brewster was awarded the Georges Petitpas
Memorial Award by the practitioner body, the World Federation of
Personnel Management Associations, in recognition of his outstan-
ding contribution to International Human Resource Management.