Chapter Overview

This chapter focuses on the meaning and concept of strategic training and development. It discusses the concepts of organizational learning and unlearning as broad themes of strategic training and development. It highlights how learning and unlearning take place and the strategic issues concerning the two concepts. Further, it delves into a discussion on career planning and development as well as succession planning.

Learning Objectives

Chapter Overview

In this chapter, we shall learn about the nature and concept of business environment and its various components. Issues related to how the components of a business environment affect organizations and human resource (HR) policies and practices are discussed. Various trends and emerging dimensions of the business environment with relevance to human resource management (HRM) are also highlighted.

Learning Objectives

Introduction

The rise of global retail value chains has been closely associated with changing gender patterns of work and growing labour force participation of women across many countries. As discussed in the previous chapter, global retailers facilitate the commercial provision of many affordable goods previously produced unpaid by women within the home. These include processed food, ready-prepared meals, ready-made garments, personal care and household goods. At the retail end of value chains, companies monitor customers (including their gender profile) to deliver a wide range of products. At the producer end, retailers coordinate suppliers to deliver on a JIT basis at low cost while ensuring quality. This commercial model, and coordination of end-to-end JIT delivery, has important implications for the types of paid work undertaken by women and men at every tier of retail value chains, from retail sales to global sourcing. Examining this is central to addressing the core questions of this book: How are global retail value chains shaping gender patterns of work, and what are the gendered outcomes for workers?

In this chapter, I explore this further by examining how engagement in global retail value chains is driving gendered fragmentation of work. It examines how women are concentrated in work that is more flexible, less well-remunerated and more insecure compared to men in every value chain tier. Drawing on information from various sources, it provides an illustrative gender mapping of work across the global agri-food value chain supplying supermarkets. This shows how gender discrimination is systemic at every tier from retail through distribution to production. The chapter then examines the trajectories of economic and social downgrading and upgrading. This provides a framework for assessing challenges and opportunities for attaining more gender equitable outcomes, which will be examined in more depth in later chapters.

As we saw in Chapter 2, three key issues constituting the mantra of global retail value chains are cost, quality and speed of delivery. I argue in this chapter that fragmented workers provide the ‘oil’ that lubricates the integrated functioning of global retail value chains on a JIT basis across national borders. In most countries in which retailers sell and/or source, labour markets are deeply embedded in social norms that configure the gender division of labour. Traditionally this has assigned certain unpaid functions to women within households—including food preparation and sewing.

Chapter Overview

This chapter focuses on strategy formulation in human resource management (HRM). The chapter delves with the role of human resource (HR) function in the strategic management process and vice versa. It highlights the importance of human resources to strategy. It also discusses the various approaches to integration of strategic planning and HRM and the factors affecting integration. The typology of HR systems in light of strategic issues is also discussed.

Learning Objectives

Introduction

Women have long played a key role in apparel production, both as contributors of family labour in traditional home-based work and as waged workers in larger-scale manufacture. Apparel is a relatively ‘footloose’ labour-intensive industry, and production can easily be relocated across countries in pursuit of lower costs. The outsourcing of apparel production from Europe and North America to developing countries in the 1980s led to the rapid rise of female employment, particularly in Asia. This generated jobs for tens of millions of women workers, many of whom previously had limited labour market access. Indeed, women are a preferred ‘low cost’ labour force in many countries because of their perceived ‘docility’ and their socially acquired skills in making garments (Elson and Pearson 1981; Hale and Wills 2005).

Developing countries often compete based on low labour costs to attract apparel FDI and buyers, driving a ‘race to the bottom’ (Applebaum et al. 2005; ILO 2016d). Civil society campaigns have long targeted global retailers and brands for driving a ‘low road’ sourcing model based on a cheap female labour force with poor working conditions and few rights (Oxfam 2004; ITUC 2016).

However, as Chapter 2 discussed, the expansion of global value chains since the 1980s has also led some buyers to move away from traditional arms-length sourcing based on low-cost assembly of ‘cut–make–trim’ (CMT) to more integrated ‘full package’ sourcing strategies. These have been labelled original equipment manufacturing (OEM) and original design manufacturing (ODM). This move requires economic upgrading and innovation by suppliers in order to be able to take on higher-value functions, including design, input sourcing, finishing and distribution (Gereffi and Memedovic 2003; WTO 2013b). Economic upgrading often requires workforce innovation and more skilled workers, to enable the achievement of higher quality and productivity levels, with implications for social upgrading and improved labour standards (Barrientos et al. 2011; Fernandez-Stark et al. 2011b).

Two types of supplier strategy can therefore be identified: the ‘low road’ of economic and social downgrading, based on low labour costs, and the ‘high road’ of economic and social upgrading, based on skill and productivity. In this chapter I focus on the ‘low road’; Chapter 8 examines a contrasting upgrading case study from an Indonesian apparel manufacturer.

Chapter Overview

This chapter deals with the idea of employee relations, engagement, and termination. It discusses the concept of employee relations and its evolution. Issues related to trade unions, collective bargaining, and employee participation in management are highlighted. The meaning and significance of employee engagement are then discussed along with the typology of engagement. Thereafter, the topics of retention and employee termination are covered.

Learning Objectives

Chapter Overview

This chapter discusses the concept of performance appraisal and performance management. The limitations of the traditional appraisal process are identified. It focuses on the need to move from performance appraisal to performance management. Further, the concepts of compensation and rewards are discussed. The difference between traditional compensation and strategic compensation is highlighted. Various types of strategic compensation systems are examined. Issues related to compensation of top-level executives are also discussed.

Learning Objectives

Chapter Overview

Job analysis identifies the duties and human requirements for each of the company's jobs. The next logical step is to decide which of these jobs need to be filled and how to fill them. This entails carrying out human resource planning (HRP). It involves linking business strategies to future manpower needs, forecasting labour demand and supply, and laying down the human resource (HR) plan to meet the labour needs. Thereafter, staffing is carried out, which typically involves recruitment, selection, and placement. This chapter deals with all these issues.

Learning Objectives

Introduction

This book draws on research undertaken over 20 years, a journey I outlined in the preface. It aims to unpack some of the complexities of changing gender patterns of work associated with global value chains. My experience, talking with workers in many sectors and countries over the years, is that both benefits and challenges come from working in global production. It is often preferable to alternative livelihood options. However, it can also involve significant problems, especially for the most precarious workers. For women, paid work can provide a route to greater economic independence, despite being low paid and despite combining it with multiple household and care responsibilities. As a Chilean temporary fruit worker told me in 1998, ‘We have always worked hard, now we are being paid for it.’

In my research, I have always tried to analyse both the commercial and the social dimensions of global value chains. I soon realized it is not possible to understand how one sphere operates without understanding how it interacts with the other. Analysing this interaction underpinned the development of the global (re)production framework examined in Chapter 4. An important dimension has been the commercial retail of many goods previously produced by women unpaid within households is now based on paid work in production largely in middle- and low-income countries. Global value chains, coordinated by buyers, now reach beyond a narrow market focus, into the households of consumers, operations of suppliers and lives of workers and smallholder farmers.

The G(r)PN framework has also helped unpack tensions within global value chains between the financial drivers of cost and efficiency and the societal drivers of quality and caring. This enables differentiation between a low road, based on downgrading trajectories of low wages, poor conditions and few rights, and a high road, based on upgrading trajectories of higher productivity with better rights, terms and conditions. Analysing the commercial dimension helps us understand how financial drivers and buyer purchasing practices can exert constant pressure on suppliers to reduce unit labour costs (via low wages or rising productivity) while delivering on quality. Analyzing the social dimension helps understand how fragmented work sustains the commercial dynamic of global value chains.

Introduction

Global sourcing has been driven in part by a search for low-cost and fast delivery, associated with a ‘low road’ outcome for workers. However, the drive for quality and innovation, especially in niche value chains, has also supported a ‘high road’ outcome for some in terms of improved conditions and rights. Yet economic and social upgrading in global retail value chains is far from automatic, as the previous chapter examined. It involves a journey of contestation, intervention and collaboration (Gereffi and Lee 2016). Governance matters if this journey is to promote more sustained gender-equitable benefits for workers. However, the dynamics are changing in a global value chain context, where private, social and public governance all play a role.

Global governance relates to the way international relations are managed, involving nation states and regional and international organizations. With greater global integration, global governance has evolved from a focus on inter-state activities to encompass the many ways that public and private actors and institutions manage their common affairs (Held et al. 1999; O'Brien et al. 2000). In the context of global value chains, the initial focus was mainly on private governance. It is now recognized that value chain governance involves a diverse range of company, civil society and state actors who are able to influence the norms and rules framing the operation of value chains across global, national and local scales (Ponte and Sturgeon 2014).

Three dimensions of private, social and public governance are identified as playing roles in global value chains (Mayer and Posthuma 2012). Private governance has received the greatest attention in the GVC literature. This involves the power of lead firms to coordinate and distribute resources along their value chains. This mainly relates to product, environmental and labour standards applied by lead firms and private sector bodies (Gereffi et al. 2005; Gibbon and Ponte 2005; Nadvi 2008). Social governance relates to the ability of CSOs, including NGOs, trade unions, charities and community groups, to influence social norms, policies, institutions and markets at national or international levels through advocacy and campaigns (Mayer and Posthuma 2012).

Introduction

Global retail sourcing, with its search for cost-effective and cost-efficient production, involves both ‘low road’ and ‘high road’ trajectories. Previous chapters mainly examined the ‘low road’ trajectory of economic and social downgrading, drawing on examples from the cocoa, fresh fruit and apparel sectors in Africa and Asia. An important argument of this book is that retailers and brands seek not only competitive prices and fast delivery but also quality products. A continuum prevails between the low- and high-road ends, with retailers and suppliers positioned in relation to different consumer end-markets. For niche retailers and brands, a focus on quality requires their suppliers to pursue a ‘high road’ trajectory. Investment in innovation and enhanced capabilities facilitates economic and social upgrading. Raising productivity and enhancing skills makes it possible to produce higher-quality products while being efficient and competitive. To achieve this, retailers need to attract and retain more highly skilled workers (often female) by offering better pay, conditions and rights. This has implications for gender patterns of work and the relationship between productive wage work and reproductive unpaid work undertaken largely by women.

This chapter examines a high-road trajectory drawing on two examples, one from Nike's equitable manufacturing (EM) initiative and the other from the Kenyan flower sector. These cases show that a pathway to economic and social upgrading with gender-equitable benefits for workers entails many challenges. Global production is embedded in social norms and institutions that underpin gender discrimination in supplier workplaces and sourcing countries. Women have been drawn into production as a ‘docile’, low-cost labour force, whose socially acquired skills help deliver on speed and quality at competitive prices. Yet global value chains have opened up channels for new forms of contestation, often led by CSOs with women workers also playing an important role.

In both the Nike apparel and Kenyan flower value chains, contestation by CSOs played an important role in pushing back on poor labour conditions during the early stages of global sourcing. However, in both cases, once innovation set in, and the benefits of raising productivity and skills became apparent, economic upgrading became linked to social upgrading. This has led to improved conditions and rights for a largely female workforce. It has also had wider implications for promoting gender-equitable outcomes and addressing issues ‘beyond the workplace’ that affect women's combined productive and reproductive roles.

With the ever-escalating challenges of the business environment, the corporate world is fast realizing the importance of human resource (HR) as an inimitable strength for attaining sustainable advantage. This has given place to the idea that human resource management (HRM) needs to be aligned to the strategic management (SM) process of the organization. The integration of the above two disciplines is termed as strategic human resource management (SHRM).

Academic debates around the 1980s and early 1990s suggested the need to integrate SM and HRM closely. These debates highlighted the growing strategic nature of the HR function. The concept of SHRM became popular in the 1980s with the development of two models that talked about integrating strategy and HRM, namely the Michigan Model and the Harvard Model. Academic writings in SHRM started to emerge after this, but it was only by the end of the 20th century that the practice gained popularity and momentum among practitioners.

In recent times, SHRM has become a well-accepted concept and practice. Today, HR is seen as potential contributors to the realization of the organization's vision. It is interesting to note that HR departments are now considered to be investment centres rather than cost centres. HR executives are today considered as important strategic partners. The increasingly important role that HR managers are playing today is exemplum of the fact that SHRM has arrived. There now exists empirical evidence that documents the contribution of the strategic HR approach to organizational performance.

Despite the increasing importance of SHRM, there is still a paucity of texts on SHRM in the context of emerging economies, more specifically in the Indian context. The volatile and dynamic business environment of emerging markets warrants an increasing focus on valuing HR and linking HR issues with strategic imperatives. Keeping in mind the fact that India is one of the fastest growing emerging markets today, this book is expected to provide insights into the fast-evolving SHRM terrain.

Almost all B-schools and universities offering management courses teach papers related to the area of HRM. However, the dearth of books on SHRM makes the task of teachers and students quite challenging in terms of obtaining relevant and contextual matter on the subject.