Chapter Overview

This chapter discusses the concept of strategic human resource (HR) evaluation. It identifies the need for measuring human resource management (HRM) activities and taking informed business decisions. Various approaches and techniques of HR evaluation are discussed. Methods of evaluation of an individual HRM subsystem as well as an HRM system as a whole are discussed in detail. The concept of HR analytics and its use in strategic HR evaluation is also highlighted at the end of the chapter.

Learning Objectives

Books are often the product of a long journey, and this one is no exception. In the 19901990s, much was being made of the ‘Chilean economic miracle’ resulting from trade liberalization implemented under the Pinochet dictatorship. As a postgraduate student of international trade and development with an interest in gender and labour in Chile, I wanted to examine the costs of this ‘miracle’ in the fruit export sector for the large female temporary labour force (las temporeras) employed each season. As part of this research, I undertook focus group discussions with groups of women fruit workers in the lower reaches of the Andes north of Santiago. This encounter dispelled many naïve assumptions I had started out with and highlighted the complexities of globalization for women workers.

Unsurprisingly, I found that, during the fruit season, las temporeras endured exceptionally long hours, with poor pay and few rights. In my discussions with workers, I enquired about their ‘bad’ experiences working in multinational and domestically owned export companies. However, I soon learnt from workers that, despite many problems, the work also provided them with economic independence relative to their previous situation. I met some very forthright temporeras, one of whom forcefully said, ‘We have always worked hard. NOW we are being paid for it.’ They preferred working for multinationals because they offered better pay and conditions than domestically owned companies. From then on, I have been more careful in my research to investigate both the challenges and opportunities for women working in global export production.

This same research also opened my eyes to the changing dynamics of trade, which conventional economics and political economy at the time were not addressing. This came about initially through a misunderstanding. My learnt Castilian was a potential barrier to comprehending the local dialect of workers. A couple of times in one focus group, workers mentioned ‘la visita de tesco’. When I enquired what ‘tesco’ meant, I was met with disbelief and laughter—they were referring to the UK supermarket Tesco. I was amazed that temporary workers in the foothills of the Andes were aware of a UK supermarket located on a different continent.

Introduction

The transformation of global retail value chains since the 1990s has been associated with significant changes in how people shop and goods are sourced. Women constitute the majority of retail customers purchasing many goods critical to household and family welfare. Gender norms have long shaped women's primary role as in the home, including the unpaid production of food and clothing for household consumption. However, as more and more women have entered the labour force, they have combined paid work with household and caring roles. Global retailers have facilitated these changes by expanding the availability of a wide array of commercially produced consumer goods at affordable prices. These include processed foods, ready-made garments and other household convenience items. Trends that first developed in North America and Europe have subsequently been replicated in middle- and lower-income countries.

Underpinning these changes has been a revolution in the operations of global retailers, with increasing dominance by a smaller number of companies. They monitor and help shape changing consumer trends through the application of information technology (IT) and marketing. They control and coordinate global value chains from the point of production through distribution to final consumers, facilitating supply of a vast range of goods cheaply on a just-in-time (JIT) basis. This has involved a transformation in global sourcing, changing how goods are produced, procured and distributed globally. Global sourcing has expanded production of manufactured and food products within many developing countries. This has generated a large feminized labour force to facilitate low-cost commercial production of consumer goods retailed. Trends in the Global North are increasingly replicated in the Global South.

This chapter provides an overview of changing gender patterns of work as well as dynamics of global retail value chains in the post-World War II period. It examines how global retail expansion has adapted to and helped shape changing gender patterns of work. It explores the retail revolution and global sourcing that underpins the provision of affordable commercially produced goods. Finally, it examines the commercial mantra of cost, quality and speed of delivery as key requirements of supply and purchasing practices of global retailers. This informs an examination in the next chapter of the implications for the feminization and fragmentation of work in production of consumer goods and gender profile of work across retail value chains.

Introduction

Economic and social downgrading and upgrading are complex processes in global retail value chains that source from agriculture. Production is embedded within traditional norms and institutions of rural society that shape commercial and social interaction in differing ways depending on product and local context. Chapter 5 examined the gendered complexities of embeddedness in relation to smallholder cocoa farming in Ghana. However, as this chapter will examine, the transition from smallholder to larger-scale commercial farming involving wage labour can also be fraught with downgrading and upgrading tensions that are gendered. Some groups experience significant challenges or total value chain exclusion, yet for others new opportunities for value chain inclusion arise. Who loses and benefits is a gendered process often overlooked in the literatures on agricultural smallholders and wage-workers. Smallholder exclusion from global value chains affects men as the recognized farmers, as well as their households, including women who have long played an unrecognized role as unpaid contributing family labour. In larger commercial farming, women play a more visible role as independent wage labour. Nevertheless, they are often concentrated in insecure temporary and seasonal work that also exposes them to downgrading pressures as suppliers manage risks and costs in supermarket value chains. Yet some women workers are able to benefit from economic upgrading involving higher quality production/processing to attain social upgrading with improved conditions and rights.

Fresh fruit and vegetables provide an important example of the gendered complexities of downgrading and upgrading. The expansion of global retail value chains (particularly cool chain innovation) has played an important role in generating the availability of fresh and processed horticultural produce all year round at affordable prices. Some southern hemisphere countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have been well positioned to take advantage of increased global demand for horticultural exports, particularly during the winter season in the Global North. However, this also exposes them to supermarket requirements on cost, quality and delivery schedules that put pressure on smallholders and smaller or less-efficient farmers engaged in retail value chains. In some countries retail pressures have led to a decline in engagement by smallholders and smaller farmers, with expansion of larger-scale commercial production and processing, but in others smallholders retain a foothold in value chains (Dolan and Humphrey 2000; Vorley et al. 2007).

Chapter Overview

In this chapter, we will discuss the meaning and concept of strategic human resource management (SHRM). Various models and schools of thought in the area of SHRM are presented. The nature and characteristics of SHRM are also discussed. The chapter also sketches a picture of the emerging human resource (HR) scenario and the changes taking place in the field of human resource management (HRM). The different types of HR roles are also discussed. In the end, the challenges facing new age HR departments are highlighted.

Learning Objectives