Sustainability and Human Resource Management: an Introduction to the Field

In this introduction to ‘Sustainability and Human Resource Management: Developing sustainable business organizations’ we outline the content and structure of the book. In this book, our academic and practitioner authors explore the potential of sustainability as a new paradigm and Sustainable HRM as a concept for HRM. We wish to contribute to fruitful debates about the role of HRM in developing sustainable work and HRM systems and the role of HRM in supporting sustainable business organizations. Our goal with this book is to advance and bring together conceptual and empirical research as well as practitioners’ views on the meaning and motifs of sustainability for HRM, on how to design and evaluate sustainable HRM systems, and on enhancing our understanding for the complex, non-linear interrelationships, potential paradoxes and tensions between economic, ecological, social and human sustainability. In this introduction, we elucidate the conceptual underpinnings of sustainability and HRM embraced in this book, we critically review the historical roots and different areas dealing with sustainability and HRM, we summarize the limitations and gaps in prior research and finally, this introduction provides short summaries of the chapters in this volume