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Human Resources has at least two meanings depending on context. Most common within corporations and businesses, human resources refers to the individuals within the firm, and to the portion of the firm's organization that deals with the hiring, firing, training, and other personnel issues. This usage is derived from the original meaning of human resources as variously defined in political economy and economics, where it was traditionally called labor, one of three factors of production. This article will address both definitions. A corporation (usually known in the United Kingdom and Ireland as a company) is a legal entity (distinct from a natural person) that often has similar rights in law to those of a Civil law systems may refer to corporations as moral persons; they may also go by the name...
Historically, the term business referred to activities or interests. ...
Political economy was the original term for the study of production and the relationships of buying and selling and their relationship to laws, customs and government. ...
Economics is the social science studying production and consumption through measurable variables. ...
In classical economics and all micro-economics labour is one of three factors of production, the others being land and capital. ...
Classical economics distinguishes between three factors of production which are used in the production of goods: Land or natural resources - naturally-occurring goods such as soil and minerals. ...
Human Resources within Firms
Though human resources have been part of business since the first days of agriculture, the modern concept of human resources began in reaction to the efficiency focus of Taylorism in the early 1900s. By 1920, psychologists and employment experts in the United States started the human relations movement, which viewed workers in terms of their psychology and fit with companies, rather than as interchangeable parts. This movement grew throughout the middle of the 20th century, placing emphasis on how leadership, cohesion, and loyalty played important roles in organizational success. Although this view was increasingly challenged by more quantitatively rigorous and less "soft" management techniques in the 1960s and beyond, human resources had gained a permanent role within the firm. Taylorism or Scientific management is the name of the approach to management and Industrial/Organizational Psychology initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor in his 1911 monograph The Principles of Scientific Management. ...
In 1948, The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) (formerly called the American Society for Personnel Administration) was formed. Today it has over 190,000 people in 100 countries. Human resource management is now considered a vital element of most firms, and plays a major role in most organizations.
Human Resources in Political Economy and Social Sciences Modern analysis emphasizes that human beings are not predictable commodity "resources" with definitions totally controlled by contract, but are creative and social beings that make contributions beyond "labor" to a society and to civilization. The broad term human capital has evolved to contain the complexity of this term, and in macro-economics the term "firm-specific human capital" has evolved to represent the original meaning of term "human resources". The Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico. ...
Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing peoples skills and abilities as used in employment and otherwise contribute to the economy. ...
Macroeconomics is the study of the entire economy in terms of the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, the level of employment of productive resources, and the general behavior of prices. ...
Advocating the central role of "human resources" or human capital in enterprises and societies has been a traditional role of socialist parties, who claim that value is primarily created by their activity, and accordingly justify a larger claim of profits or relief from these enterprises or societies. Critics say this is just a bargaining tactic which grew out of various practices of medieval European guilds into the modern trade union and collective bargaining unit. The color red and particularly the red flag are traditional symbols of Socialism. ...
A guild is an association of persons of the same trade or pursuits, formed to protect mutual interests and maintain standards of morality or conduct. ...
A union (labor union in American English; trade union, sometimes trades union, in British English; either labour union or trade union in Canadian English) is a legal entity consisting of employees or workers having a common interest, such as all the assembly workers for one employer, or all the workers...
A contrary view, common to capitalist parties, is that it is the infrastructural capital and (what they call) intellectual capital owned and fused by "management" that provides most value in financial capital terms. This likewise justifies a bargaining position and a general view that "human resources" are interchangeable. Capitalism has been defined in various ways (see definitions of capitalism). ...
Infrastructural capital refers to any physical means of production or means of protection beyond that which can be gathered or found directly in nature, i. ...
Intellectual capital is a term with various definitions in different theories of economics. ...
Financial capital, or economic capital, is any liquid medium or mechanism that represents wealth, or other styles of capital. ...
A significant sign of consensus on this latter point is the ISO 9000 series of standards which requires a "job description" of every participant in a productive enterprise. In general, heavily unionized nations such as France and Germany have adopted and encouraged such descriptions especially within trade unions. One view of this trend is that a strong social consensus on political economy and a good social welfare system facilitates labor mobility and tends to make the entire economy more productive, as labor can move from one enterprise to another with little controversy or difficulty in adapting. ISO 9000 specifies requirements for a Quality Management System overseeing the production of a product or service. ...
The French Republic or France (French: République française or France) is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents. ...
Political economy was the original term for the study of production and the relationships of buying and selling and their relationship to laws, customs and government. ...
An important controversy regarding labor mobility illustrates the broader philosophical issue with usage of the phrase "human resources": governments of developing nations often regard developed nations that encourage immigration or "guest workers" as appropriating human capital that is rightfully part of the developing nation and required to further its growth as a civilization. They argue that this appropriation is similar to colonial commodity fiat wherein a colonizing European power would define an arbitrary price for natural resources, extracting which diminished national natural capital. The Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, Mexico. ...
Natural resources are commodities that are considered valuable in their relatively unmodified (natural) form. ...
Natural capital refers to the mineral, plant, and animal formations of the Earths biosphere when viewed as a means of production of oxygen, water filter, erosion preventer, or provider of other natural services. ...
The debate regarding "human resources" versus human capital thus in many ways echoes the debate regarding natural resources versus natural capital. Over time the United Nations have come to more generally support the developing nations' point of view, and have requested significant offsetting "foreign aid" contributions so that a developing nation losing human capital does not lose the capacity to continue to train new people in trades, professions, and the arts. The United Nations, or UN, is an international organization made up of 191 states established in 1945. ...
An extreme version of this view is that historical inequities such as African slavery must be compensated by current developed nations, which benefitted from stolen "human resources" as they were developing. This is an extremely controversial view, but it echoes the general theme of converting human capital to "human resources" and thus greatly diminishing its value to the host society, i.e. "Africa", as it is put to narrow imitative use as "labor" in the using society.
In the very narrow context of corporate "human resources", there is a contrasting pull to reflect and require workplace diversity that echoes the diversity of a global customer base. Foreign language and culture skills, ingenuity, humor, and careful listening, are examples of traits that such programs typically require. It would appear that these evidence a general shift to the human capital point of view, and an acknowledgement that human beings do contribute much more to a productive enterprise than "work": they bring their character, their ethics, their creativity, their social connections, and in some cases even their pets and children, and alter the character of a workplace. The term corporate culture is used to characterize such processes. Organizational Culture refers to the values, beliefs and customs of an organization. ...
The traditional but extremely narrow context of hiring, firing, and job description is considered a 20th century anachronism. Most corporate organizations that compete in the modern global economy have adopted a view of human capital that mirrors the modern consensus as above. Some of these, in turn, deprecate the term "human resources" as useless.
As the term refers to predictable exploitations of human capital in one context or another, it can still be said to apply to manual labor, mass agriculture, low skill "McJobs" in service industries, military and other work that has clear job descriptions, and which generally do not encourage creative or social contributions. Manual labor is a term used for hard physical work done with the hands, especially in an unskilled manual job such as fruit and vegetable picking, et cetera. ...
Farming, ploughing rice paddy, in Indonesia Agriculture is the process of producing food, feed, fiber and other desired products by cultivation of certain plants and the raising of domesticated animals ( livestock). ...
In general the abstractions of macro-economics treat it this way - as it characterizes no mechanisms to represent choice or ingenuity. So one interpretation is that "firm-specific human capital" as defined in macro-economics is the modern and correct definition of "human resources" - and that this is inadequate to represent the contributions of "human resources" in any modern theory of political economy. Political economy was the original term for the study of production and the relationships of buying and selling and their relationship to laws, customs and government. ...
See also Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), or also called HR modules, shape an intersection in between human resource management and information technology. ...
HR-XML is an independent, non-profit consortium dedicated to enabling e-commerce and inter-company exchange of human resources data worldwide. ...
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