An overview of contemporary international human resource management studies. Themes and relationships
| Published date | 20 November 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-11-2016-0140 |
| Pages | 490-508 |
| Date | 20 November 2017 |
| Author | Yuan-Duen Lee,Chiu-Chuan Lin,Chen-Fen Huang |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information user studies,Metadata,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
An overview of contemporary
international human resource
management studies
Themes and relationships
Yuan-Duen Lee, Chiu-Chuan Lin and Chen-Fen Huang
Graduate School of Business and Operations Management,
Chang Jung Christian University, Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this pap er is to identify the evo lution of the intelle ctual structure of
international human re source management (IHRM) studi es and to propose a theory of an invisible ne twork
of knowledge (INK).
Design/methodology/approach –Researchers can also use thi s methodology to explore the knowledge
network of their own fie lds so as to gain a vantage po sition with respect to t heir field and conduct
seminal research.
Findings –The results help to profi le the INK production in IHR M and provide important i nsights
with implications for c urrent and future resea rch directions of IHRM st udies for management sc holars
and practitioners.
Originality/value –This study examines the s tatus of contemporary IH RM research over the last
decade. This study examines the status of contemporaryIHRM research over the last decade. With Social
SciencesCitationIndexcitationdatafromthetopIHRMjournal,InternationalJournal of Human Resource
Management, this stud y used citation and co-citation analys is to identify the most important public ations,
scholars, and research themes in the IHRM area, and then mapped the intellectual structure of
IHRM studies.
Keywords Co-citation analysis, Social network analysis, Data mining, Article co-citation matrix,
International human resource management, Invisible network of knowledge
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
International human resource has an important role in the global economy, and most
companies are now engaged in interactions across national borders (Cheng and Lin, 2009).
The past decade has seen a growth in research on international human resource
management (IHRM), and thus produced an impressive array of IHRM-related studies.
However, no study has examined how recent IHRM research has evolved, what the status of
current IHRM studies is, and what the key research themes are. The objective of this study
is therefore to provide IHRM researchers with an overview of contemporary IHRM-related
publications in the last decade, and to map the intellectual structure of different research
topics and relationships in the development of this field. This study also attempts to help
identify the linkages among different publications and confirm their status and positions
with regard to their contributions to the development of IHRM. The principal methods used
are citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis, plus a factor analysis which is
performed to identify the invisible network of knowledge (INK) generation underlying the
IHRM literature.
The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is used for the analysis. This is a widely
used database, which includes citations published in over 2,000 of the world’sleading
scholarly social sciences journals, covering more than 50 disciplines. The SSCI
thus provides the most comprehensive and widely accepted database of IHRM
publications. Among the journals included in the SSCI, the International Journal of Human
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 35 No. 4, 2017
pp. 490-508
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/LHT-11-2016-0140
Received 29 November 2016
Revised 11 March 2017
23 April 2017
13 May 2017
Accepted 15 May 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
490
LHT
35,4
Resource Management (IJHRM) is arguably the most influential one publishing IHRM-
related papers, and so is used as the core source for analysis. The advantage
of using journals instead of keywords to generate the ne eded citation da ta is the
“guaranteed quality”of their published papers, and their clear boundaries with regard to
the acceptable methods and topics as defined by their specific editorial policies.
This study thus included all the papers published in IJHRM from 2007 to 2016. The results
included 1,640 journal articles in total, which further cited 109,864 other publications
as references. The cited publications in these papers include both books and published
journal articles.
The study is divided into four main sections. The first section is a review of the author
co-citation analysis (ACA) literature; the second section contains a description of the
methodology employed in this work; the third section presents and discusses the results of
the empirical study; and the fourth section presents a summary and discussion of the
conclusions to be drawn from this investigation, including its limitations and suggestions
for future research.
Review of the academic literature on the ACA
ACA is a widely applied bibliometric technique that uses a matrix of co-citation frequencies
between authors as its input (McCain, 1990). The ACA, which uses seminal authors in a
discipline as the units of analysis, is based on the idea that the conceptual similarity in the
works of such authors would increase the likelihood of their being cited together regularly
(McCain, 1990). The frequency of co-citation is therefore a measure of the proximity between
authors (White and Griffith, 1981).
The ACA’s unit of analysis is an individual author rather than a specific paper or journal,
although it must be noted that the name of author is merely a label for the central conceptual
theme or idea that he or she represents (Culnan, 1986). The intellectual map is thus a
representation of ideational interactions among authors established through the frequency
of co-citation and overall distribution of co-citations that they share with one another
(McCain, 1990; White and McCain, 1998). This makes the ACA eminently suitable for
explicating the subfields that fall within the overall disciplinary domain of IHRM.
More specifically, the ACA’s ability to reveal patterns of association between authors based
on their co-citation frequency makes it a potentially useful methodology for understanding
the evolution of an academic discipline (White and McCain, 1998). Moreover, the versatility
of the technique and its acceptance by many different disciplines make it appropriate
for this study.
The ACA has been shown to be able to describe, from an empirical standpoint,
the intellectual structure of one academic discipline using an objective method. It has
been applied in many academic areas, such as management and social sciences
(Neeley, 1981), information systems management (Culnan, 1986), organizational behavior
(Culnan et al., 1990), consumer research (Hoffman and Holbrook, 1993), advertising
(Pasadeos et al., 1998), information science (White and McCain, 1998), management
(Tahai and Meyer, 1999), production and operations management (Pilkington and
Liston-Heyes, 1999), strategic management (Ramos and Ruiz, 2004), knowledge
management (Ponzi, 2002; Ma and Yu, 2010), international management (Acedo and
Casillas, 2005), management of technology (Pilkington and Teichert, 2006), family
business (Casillas and Acedo, 2007), R&D Management (McMillan, 2008), conflict
management (Ma et al., 2008), international business (Griffith et al., 2008), human resource
management (Mariluz and Antonio, 2009), electronic commerce (Ma, 2009a), business
ethics (Ma, 2009b), decision analysis (Lee et al., 2010), international ethnic
entrepreneurship (Ma et al., 2012), global branding (Chabowski et al., 2013),
and expatriate studies (Wang et al., 2013). The use of such a bibliometric approach has
491
International
human
resource
management
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