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Call for Papers
Special Issue of Human Resource Management
Strategic Human Resource Management in the Era of Environmental Disruptions

Guest Editors:
Sunghoon Kim, The University of Sydney Business School, Australia, sunghoon.kim@sydney.edu.au
Vlad Vaiman, California Lutheran University School of Management, USA, vvaiman@callutheran.edu
Karin Sanders, UNSW Business School, Australia, k.sanders@unsw.edu.au

Background, Objectives, and Subject Coverage of the Special Issue:
Environmental disruptions – usually referred to as ecological situations where people face life-threatening changes in their living conditions (Ehrlich, 1981) – are now discussed beyond its original context of the natural environment. Environmental disruptions are distinctive from related concepts of environmental uncertainty and environmental turbulence in the sense that it implicates the displacement of existing arrangements. The current COVID-19 crisis is a livid example of such an environmental disruption.
With increasing degree of frequency, organizations around the world have experienced environmental disruptions that require them to reassess and reformulate their way of managing employees. For instance, the economic transition of China and the Eastern European region forced many organizations to reinvent their entire systems of human resource management (Cooke, 2011). The Asian financial crisis in 1997 mandated companies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korean to abandon some of their long-held HR systems and practices (Bae, et al., 2003) is another example. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing mobility restrictions led many companies to rethink the established notion of the physical workspace (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020) and traditional ways to organize international HRM (Caligiuri et al., 2020).
This special issue of Human Resource Management invites HR scholars to reflect on the implications of environmental disruptions to organizational HR systems, and thereby make novel contributions to the literature of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM). Despite the notable achievements made over the last four decades, SHRM scholarship still has many areas for further development (Jiang & Messersmith, 2018). This special issue intends to be a platform for researchers who wish to answer this call by giving special attention to environmental disruptions.

Key themes that we hope the special issue will explore and examine include, but are not limited to:
• New SHRM theories that take into account the role of environmental disruptions.
• Attracting, developing, deploying, and retaining global talents during an environmental disruption.
• HR (sub)systems and practices that enhance organizational resilience against environmental disruptions.
• Diversity and inclusion practices during environmental disruption.
• Employees' perception, understanding and attribution of HR in the context of environmental disruption.
• Social construction of environmental disruptions and its implications to SHRM

Submission Details:
Submission Deadline: February 15, 2021
Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, submission guidelines, and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the HRM page here.

If you have any questions about a potential submission, please feel free to contact any of the guest editors.

See for more information: https://bit.ly/3hsdzoa

References
Bae, J., Chen, S. J., David Wan, T. W., Lawler, J. J., & Walumbwa, F. O. (2003). Human resource strategy and firm performance in Pacific Rim countries. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 14(8), 1308-1332.
Brynjolfsson, E., Horton, J. J., Ozimek, A., Rock, D., Sharma, G., & TuYe, H. Y. (2020). Covid-19 and remote work: An early look at us data (No. w27344). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cooke, F. L. (2011). The role of the state and emergent actors in the development of human resource management in China. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 22(18), 3830-3848.
Ehrlich, P. R. (1981). Environmental disruption: Implications for the social sciences. Social Science Quarterly, 62(1), 7.
Jiang, K., & Messersmith, J. (2018). On the shoulders of giants: A meta-review of strategic human resource management. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(1), 6-33.

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Karin Sanders, Professor
UNSW Business School
Sydney, Australia
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