Studying human resource management in the international context: The case of central and eastern Europe

Like all edited books, this volume is a result of the collective efforts over a long period of time of a number of individual researchers and research teams with whom we have had the pleasure of working. Many trade-offs have had to be made in terms of the range and depth of the material presented in the text, but our guiding principle was always to ensure an appropriate treatment of subject and of a geographic territory not historically well documented. With this in mind, and drawing upon the expertise of local authors/author teams in each country, we set ourselves the task of charting the landscape of human resource management (HRM) in the complex terrain that is contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and to do so in a way that would provide a broad account of commonalities and differences apparent in the range of economies examined. We openly acknowledge that each of the countries under investigation here is deserving of further in-depth analyses in its own right. That, however, is a task for others and for another day and one which will no doubt excavate in a much deeper way than we have attempted here in this broader regional comparative volume. Dedicated country-specific volumes on HRM in Central and Eastern Europe in this genre are beginning to emerge (see, for example, the edited volume by Domsch and Lidokhover (2007) on Human Resource Management in Russia).