Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 74

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The real problem: The deadly combination of psychologisation, scientism, and normative promotionalism takes strategic human resource management down a 30‐year dead end

Kaufman, Bruce E.·2020·Human Resource Management Journal
DOI 10.1111/1748-8583.12278
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This paper engages with Troth and Guest (2019) on psychology in HRM. I argue they misframe the central issue in debate. The real problem is not psychology per se but psychologisation—the drive to reduce explanation of macro‐level HRM outcomes to individual‐level psychological‐behavioural factors and individual differences. Accordingly, the most visible and harmful effects of psychologisation are in strategic HRM and the HRM‐performance literature but Troth and Guest's defence of psychology does not cover them. I use this response to re‐establish that it is psychologisation, not psychology per se, that is the critics' focal concern and describe how the three‐decade advance of psychologisation, along with scholastic scientism and normative promotionalism, have created severe theoretical and empirical problems in the high‐performance research programme and taken the strategic HRM field down a 30‐year dead‐end. Suggestions for a turn‐around are provided.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/1748-8583.12278

Cites

4 of 4 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 4 references

Research works printed but not linked: 99

  1. Appelbaum E., 2000, Manufacturing advantage: Why high‐performance systems pay off
  2. Baron J., 1999, Firms, Markets, and Hierarchies
  3. 10.1080/09585192.2011.610933 · DOI
  4. 10.1002/hrm.21726 · DOI · Paper page
  5. Beer M., 1984, Managing Human Assets
  6. 10.1257/aer.20170491 · DOI · Paper page
  7. 10.5465/amr.1982.4285240 · DOI · Paper page
  8. 10.1080/09585192.2018.1479878 · DOI · Paper page
  9. 10.1177/0149206318818718 · DOI · Paper page
  10. 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2005.tb00154.x · DOI · Paper page
  11. Boudreau J., 2007, Beyond HR: The new science of human capital
  12. Boxall P., 2013, HRM & performance: Achievements & challenges
  13. 10.1177/0022185614527980 · DOI
  14. 10.1007/978-1-137-40765-8 · DOI · Paper page
  15. Boyer R., 2014, Oxford Handbook of Employment Relations: Comparative Employment Systems
  16. Budd J., 2004, Employment with a human face: Balancing efficiency, equity, and voice
  17. Budd J., 2019, The psychologisation of employment relations, alternative models of the employment relationship, and the OB turn, Human Resource Management Journal
  18. Cappelli P., 2001, Do ‘high‐performance’ work practices improve establishment level outcomes?, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 54, 737
  19. 10.1002/job.2295 · DOI
  20. 10.1111/1748-8583.12163 · DOI · Paper page
  21. De Winne S., 2013, HRM & performance: achievements & challenges
  22. 10.1080/09585191003729309 · DOI
  23. 10.2307/256713 · DOI · Paper page
  24. 10.1111/1748-8583.12137 · DOI · Paper page
  25. 10.1111/j.1564-913X.2015.00053.x · DOI
  26. 10.1111/1748-8583.12195 · DOI · Paper page
  27. Edwards P., 2009, The Routledge companion to strategic human resource management, 40
  28. 10.1108/00483480810850506 · DOI
  29. 10.1177/001979391306600108 · DOI
  30. Fombrun C., 1984, Strategic human resource management
  31. Foulkes F., 1980, Personnel policies in large nonunion firms
  32. 10.5465/amle.2005.16132558 · DOI · Paper page
  33. 10.1515/9781400845354 · DOI · Paper page
  34. 10.1111/1748-8583.12030 · DOI
  35. 10.1080/09585192.2018.1521462 · DOI
  36. Grandori A. (2013).Handbook of Economic Organization. Northampton: Elgar. · DOI
  37. 10.1177/2397002216684998 · DOI
  38. 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00164.x · DOI · Paper page
  39. 10.1016/S1053-4822(01)00048-1 · DOI
  40. 10.1111/1748-8583.12082 · DOI
  41. 10.2307/256741 · DOI · Paper page
  42. 10.1016/j.hrmr.2020.100749 · DOI
  43. 10.4135/9781529714852.n3 · DOI
  44. 10.1080/09585192.2017.1384930 · DOI · Paper page
  45. 10.1177/001979391006300403 · DOI
  46. 10.1111/1744-7941.12048 · DOI
  47. 10.2307/2525140 · DOI
  48. 10.1002/hrm.10075 · DOI
  49. Kaufman B., 2008, Managing the human factor: The early years of human resource management in American industry
  50. 10.1111/j.1468-232X.2009.00600.x · DOI
  51. 10.5465/amp.2012.0037 · DOI
  52. Kaufman B., 2013, Keeping the commitment model in the air during turbulent times: Employee involvement at Delta Air Lines, Industrial Relations, 52, 343, 10.1111/irel.12006 · DOI
  53. 10.4337/9781782548225.00026 · DOI
  54. 10.1111/1748-8583.12056 · DOI
  55. 10.1111/1748-8583.12085 · DOI
  56. 10.1016/j.hrmr.2016.04.006 · DOI
  57. Kaufman B., 2020, Richard Lester's institutional‐industrial relations model of labor markets and the near‐zero minimum wage employment effect: The model Card and Krueger ignored but shouldn't have, Journal of Economic Issues, 10.1080/00213624.2020.1818514 · DOI
  58. 10.7202/1056973ar · DOI
  59. Kaufman B. Barry M. Wilkinson A. &Gomez R.(2020). Alternative balanced scorecards built from paradigm models in strategic HRM and Employment/Industrial Relations and used to measure the state of employment relations and HR system performance across U.S. workplaces.Human Resource Management Journal forthcoming. · DOI
  60. 10.1177/001979391106400306 · DOI
  61. 10.18559/ebr.2015.2.2 · DOI
  62. Kochan T., 1998, Researching the world of work
  63. Koppes L., 2007, Historical perspectives in industrial and organizational psychology
  64. 10.5465/amp.2014.0127 · DOI
  65. Landsberger H., 1958, Hawthorne revisited
  66. Lane C., 2014, The Oxford handbook of employment relations
  67. Lawler E., 1986, High‐involvement management
  68. 10.1515/9781400845354-014 · DOI
  69. 10.1037/10019-000 · DOI · Paper page
  70. Maier N., 1946, Psychology in industry
  71. 10.1287/orsc.8.6.698 · DOI · Paper page
  72. 10.1093/0198294220.001.0001 · DOI · Paper page
  73. 10.1017/CBO9781139173742 · DOI · Paper page
  74. 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091328 · DOI · Paper page
  75. 10.1007/s10869-017-9524-7 · DOI
  76. 10.1177/001979391106400401 · DOI
  77. Paauwe J., 2017, Strategy, HRM, and performance: A contextual approach
  78. Paauwe J., 2013, HRM & performance: Achievements & challenges
  79. Peccei R., 2013, HRM & performance: Achievements & challenges, 15
  80. 10.4135/9781529714852.n25 · DOI
  81. 10.5465/amj.2007.27151939 · DOI · Paper page
  82. 10.1177/103530461002000205 · DOI
  83. 10.1111/1748-8583.12103 · DOI
  84. 10.2307/1906815 · DOI · Paper page
  85. 10.2307/1956650 · DOI · Paper page
  86. Smelser N., 2005, Handbook of Economic Sociology
  87. 10.1007/s10672-016-9282-0 · DOI
  88. 10.1177/0149206318816179 · DOI
  89. Tead O., 1920, Personnel administration: Its principles and practices
  90. 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2011.00180.x · DOI
  91. 10.1037/0021-9010.93.4.864 · DOI
  92. 10.1016/S1053-5357(01)00093-2 · DOI
  93. 10.1002/hrm.21601 · DOI
  94. Troth A., 2019, The case for psychology in HRM, Human Resource Management Journal, this issue.
  95. Walton R., 1985, HRM trends and challenges
  96. 10.4324/9781315299556-4 · DOI
  97. 10.1177/014920639201800205 · DOI · Paper page
  98. 10.1016/1053-4822(91)90015-5 · DOI · Paper page
  99. 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113052 · DOI

Cited by

See all 74

Metadata

Authors
Kaufman, B. E.
Affiliations
Department of Economics Georgia State University Atlanta Georgia USA
ORCID
Kaufman, Bruce E.
Venue
Human Resource Management Journal
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2020-01
Volume
30
Issue
1
Pages
49-72
ISSN
  • 0954-5395
  • 1748-8583
DOI
10.1111/1748-8583.12278
Cited by
74
References
4
Language
en
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor, 13 d)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The real problem: The deadly combination of psychologisation, scientism, and normative promotionalism takes strategic human resource management down a 30‐year dead end. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/1748-8583.12278
The paper
Kaufman, B. E. (2020). The real problem: The deadly combination of psychologisation, scientism, and normative promotionalism takes strategic human resource management down a 30‐year dead end. Human Resource Management Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12278

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.