Introduction
The article The place of International Human Resource Management in International Business is written by Denice Welch and Ingmar Bjorkman. It “addresses the issue of whether International Human Resource Management is disconnected from other International Business studies” (Welch & Bjorkman, 2014, p. 303).
Main text
To support their idea the authors presented the results of the content analysis that was made of 383 articles from the main international business journals. Content analysis methodology lets the scholars analyse the sources they chose in a systematic way to be able to imagine a field’s accumulated knowledge (Williams & Plouffe, 2007). During the operational period, the research suffered some changes and was extended into broader multinational management issues to support the thesis. Moreover, the thoughts of people working in this sphere and authors’ personal experience were included to analyse the information from the articles. The majority of the sources that are available on the reference list were printed in the last ten years, however, there are some dated back to the 20th century.
The information in the article seems to be trustworthy, as it is based on a great number of sources. Their authors’ thoughts are analysed and compared. On the strength of this, the way of brushing aside unclear, doubtful, and erroneous data can be traced. On top of that, the text of the research includes quotations, which makes it look authoritative.
The fact that the research was broadened to get more concrete information about such multinational management issues like the transfer of HRM practices into subsidiary operations, increases the accuracy of the attained results.
While analysing, Denice Welch and Ingmar Bjorkman used their knowledge in the sphere to verify the data. They also consulted their colleagues to get other points of view on the discussed problem. To prove this they claim that “as IHRM scholars, we have heard IB colleagues comment that ‘IHRM equals expatriate management’” (Welch & Bjorkman, 2014, p. 304).
Using content analysis Denice Welch and Ingmar Bjorkman defined the research’s concentration of the field, showed what lies on the periphery of it, and specified the topics they omitted in their work. This information will be of great importance for other researchers in this sphere, as they will have an opportunity to use the article to conduct their explorations.
The authors of this article did a great job by summing the discussed data and providing the readers with different tables that made it easier to perceive and understand the information. The explanations to those tables are precise and dilated. The overall data is usually given to avoid possible inaccuracy.
The reasoning is fact and confirmed by thoughts of other sources. For example, Denice Welch and Ingmar Bjorkman as well as Anne-Wil Harzing and Ashly Pinnington (2011) pointed in their work that home country factors influence MNCs operating, but the attention paid to this issue by other scholars is not enough (p. 246). Of course, it is impossible to say that no bias reasoning is included in the article, as a human factor is not a thing one can easily avoid. In this regard, the work includes some personal authors’ predictions that defer to no one, like “IHRM researchers may contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the contribution of HR systems and activities to organizational performance” (Welch & Bjorkman, 2014, p. 315). However, this article is written by the masters of their trade, so their assumption should be taken into account.
Conclusion
Thus, it can be concluded that the article under analysis is well-written and trustworthy. The data given by the authors are verified and authoritative. The text was written based on a great number of recently published articles connected with the specific field. It would be better if the article included some diagrams and had no bias reasoning. However, the advantages of this work dominate its disadvantages.
References
Harzing A., & Pinnington A. (2011) International human resource management (3rd ed.). Loa Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.
Welch, D., & Bjorkman, I. (2014). The place of international human resource management in international business. Management International Review, 55 (3), 303-322. Web.
Williams, B. C., & Plouffe, C. R. (2007). Assessing the evolution sales knowledge: a 20-year content analysis. Industrial Marketing Management, 36 (4), 408–419.