Paradigm Development and Diffusion in Human Resource Management over 39 Years of Scholarship.

Scholars have long held that the emergence of the human resource management (HRM) as a science, has spelt the effective demise of the domain of industrial relations (IR). Likewise, (core) HRM has faced challenges to its academic legitimacy from the multiple adjoining domains of Critical HRM, Critical management studies and Strategic Human resource management. Through a mixed methods historiography, this study aims to demystify the paradigmatic developments and diffusions around this discourse. The Scopus database is used to systematically retrieve 293 peer-reviewed articles. These are subjected to bibliometrics and content analysis techniques. It is observed that the Critical HRM paradigm has lately become most impactful as concerns citation data, while IR has waned in influence by the same indicator. The USA and UK emerge as the two countries that are leading scholarship in the HRM discourse overall. An institutional theoretic explanation is offered for the paradigmatic diffusions observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]