Chapter 1: Human Resource Management in Emerging Economies

This chapter provides an evaluation of human resource management (HRM) in emerging economies. Considering the global diversity and broad range of emerging economies, we focus on the Asian and African contexts, including the Sino-African nexus in management and the diffusion of HRM policy and practices. There are various ‘lenses’ or analytical perspectives in which HRM in emerging economies can be critically analysed (Horwitz and Cooke, 2022). Two widely used frameworks are institutional or regulatory and cross-cultural frameworks, with the latter also considering the importance of cultural pluralism. This chapter focuses largely on these two, plus underlining a third, namely the importance of context or contingency factors as compared with universal perspectives.