Competitive advantage through people: Unleashing the power of the work force, by Jeffrey Pfeffer. (1994). Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 288 pp., $24.95 cloth
✍ Scribed by Alan Clardy
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 212 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This is a big book, not in terms of its length but rather because of its panoramic view of the competitive advantages achieved through highperforrriance human resources (HR) management practices. Pfeffer's message is equally important for scholars and students, HR professionals of all stripes, and general managers alike. Human resource development (HRD) professionals in particular will benefit in two ways: by appreciating the pivotal role HRD plays in creating the high-performance work force and by understanding how high performance comes from integrating HR practices in compensation, planning, selection, and the like.
Pfeffer's intention is to single out for inspection the institutional management regimen that has historically characterized American business. With this context in mind, in Part I he identifies sixteen practices for building a highperformance work force and thereby achieving an enduring competitive advantage. In addition, the distinction between traditional and high-performance HR management sets the stage for Pfeffer's critique, in Part 11, of how distinctly American ideologies, history, and laws exert an undertow of forces that threaten U.S. business success in the global economy. Part 111 looks at how to