Introduction: Work, Workplaces and Human Resource Management in a Disruptive World

This Handbook is premised on the idea that Human Resource Management (HRM) increasingly operates within a context characterised by dynamism, complexity and disruption (Bartram and Cooke, 2021; Claus, 2019). For example, a recent White Paper by the World Economic Forum (2019) ‘HR4.0: Shaping People Strategies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ pointed to its impacts in blurring the lines between people and technology and resulting in a fusion of the physical, digital and biological worlds. Inevitably, this revolution has important implications for work, workplaces and HRM practices, and it provides the impetus and motivation to produce this Handbook and take a critical look at what these changes mean for people, work, employment and the types of HRM approaches and practices that fit this new dynamic context. While reports such as those produced by the World Economic Forum are useful, they do not engage with the complexities of these changes and implications for HRM scholars and practitioners. It is these issues that we consider in the three distinct sections of this Handbook. The Handbook seeks to be innovative, practical and forward thinking in conceptualising and theorising HRM in rapidly changing and uncertain local and global environments. We hope the Handbook will act as a catalyst to encourage discussion and debate on the topics we explore in the chapters that follow. In this introduction, we first provide a brief overview of the key forces leading to disruption. We then summarise the chapters and the main themes included in each one.