The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has recently published a text book Human Resources Management in Industries of Pakistan. The book has been authored by Lieutenant Colonel Raza Kamal (Retd), a leading specialist in this field, with several years of experience of teaching the subject at Army Staff Colleges and the PAF Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology (PAF -KIET) where he served as Director Faculty of Management Sciences during 2000-2008.
This is a very welcome contribution because management sciences texts in Pakistan that are currently in use at our business schools are British and American. They presume a legal, social and institutional contest which is alien to Pakistan hence students when they enter the business world find that much of what they have learnt cannot be put into practice and since the in-house training programmes of most corporations also mainly use foreign texts they are of little use as well. This deficiency of our academic programmes is particularly harmful for human resource management teaching a subject particularly contextualized by the local legal, institutional and social environment.
Producing Pakistanised texts should be a priority concern, we may recall that Jawaharlal Nehru's government gave top priority in the 1950's specially in the social sciences and humanities disciplines to the production of Indianised texts.
The HEC has launched a text book publication programme but its bureaucratic procedures are unnecessarily delaying publication. The publication of this book was delayed for over three years. The book is divided into fourteen chapters. It presents a synoptic view of the current thinking in the HRM field (drawn from conventional texts) and an impressionistic assessment of HRM practices in Pakistan on the basis of these conventional theories.
The theoretical chapters cover the entire course of the MBA, HRM unit ranging from job analysis, HR planning recruitment and selection, performance appraisal, compensation, legislation, safety and welfare to labour relations, collective bargaining and industrial relations and trade union issues. Material specific to Pakistan is scattered throughout these chapters. Chapter 1 contains a section on "HRM challenges to Pakistan" and a section on "HR and Islamic values", there is also a brief description of Imam Ghazali's "step change" model.
The "challenges" section focuses on brain drain job insecurity and work ethics. The discussion is mainly descriptive and recommendatory. Chapter II presents a detailed description of the demographics of our labour force and a synaptic view of labour policy changes. Chapter 10 presents a detailed analysis of the Factories Act of 1934 and the Industrial Relations Act of 2012 and of the Industrial and Commercial Employment Ordinance of 1968. It also reviews legislation with respect to wages, other benefits, and social issues such as disabled and children's employment and discrimination at work.
The section on multinationals in Pakistan and on issues raised by globalization for Pakistan's human resources management is brief and a comparison between multinational subsidiaries based in Pakistan and national corporation's HRM practices would have been useful. Similarly a survey of compliance by firms in Pakistan with regard to International Labour Standards is missing.
The institutional infrastructure for regulating employment is described in detail with special emphasis on safety issues. However, the section on the trade union movement in Pakistan is extremely brief and although the collective bargaining mechanism is described it is not evaluated. Similarly, the chapter on strategic human resources management lacks Pakistani content. We do not learn from this book how strategic management is actually under taken by companies in Pakistan.
One would have wished for more company level data and case studies of HRM related issues in this book. But perhaps this is asking for the moon - Corporate sector firms in Pakistan both national and multinational - are "black boxes" extremely reluctant to provide access to academic observers to their internal decision making processes. Indeed, there is a "Chinese Wall" separating the world of business from the academic business world in Pakistan. In depth case study material on HR issues in non-existent in the country. A book author usually does not have the orientation or the time to undertake case studies. Case studies units established at our leading business schools have not been able to produce anything like the material that is regularly produced in China - let alone in the other asian tiger economies.
It is business which ultimately bears the cost of this 'closed door' policy for by denying access to academicians and national policy makers to its functional processes firms make it impossible for anyone to undertake meaningful micro level research. The major firms have set up no interval research units or corporate universities to undertake such work. The result is adapting state of the art management science advances effectively in the Pakistani business environment remains a rarity. Kamal has made an effort to circumvent this problem by organising pilot type student surveys but this of course is not sufficient.
Nevertheless, Raza Kamal's book is a must read for MBA and BBA students and for foreign employees of multinational subsidiaries who want to familiarise theories with the Pakistani legal and institutional environment. In my opinion this is the best reader friendly descriptive account of the HRM system in Pakistan. It is available free of charge from HEC Islamabad. This pricing strategy is mystifying. There is are several thousand students of HRM in universities and in the business world in Pakistan but HEC has printed only 500 copies: Therefore commercial publication of this book is urgently needed.
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Book : "Textbook of Human Resource Management in
Industries of Pakistan"
Author : Lieutenant Colonel Raza Kamal (Retd)
Publisher : Higher Education Commission, Government of Pakistan,
Sector H.9 Islamabad
Pages : 284
Price : NA
(The writer is Dean: Management Sciences SBB Dewan University)
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