Human resources management is a concept that has considerably evolved over the past few years, only if semantically. The 'personnel department’ has been replaced by the acronym HRM, or ‘staff and organisation’ in the civil service, showing a professionalisation of the sector. We are therefore far from the day where you – simply – had to select the (supposedly) best person for the vacancy within a structure, whether public or private, and to pay them correctly.

Today, the stakes have become considerably more complex and diverse. The aim of François Pichault is to theorise them. Almost 15 years ago, he published Les pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines (The practices of human resources management) with Jean Nizet. This work, which is a true reference in the French-speaking world, has gone out of print on several occasions. It has now been republished and entirely reviewed (1). It offers a renewed typology of human resources management models that can be found in the life of organisations.

François Pichault, professor at the University of Liège’s HEC Management School, explains this success by his many-sided approach to human resources. For him, HRM isn’t applied in the same way in an SME, a public service or a start-up. “It is necessary to examine the diversity of the situations”, he explains. “Having made this observation, my colleague Jean Nizet (FOPES- Catholic University of Louvain) and I developed an approach, at the time, focusing on the context of HRM, which went against the mainstream at the end of the 1990s.”

Immediately, other theoreticians adopted the work sometimes developing it, sometimes contradicting it. “And then”, remembers François Pichault, “the publisher asked us to completely review our book, which we accepted, although we underestimated the extent of the task.” It wasn’t simply a question of adding two or three references here and there; on the contrary, it was a matter of rethinking a theory in the light of new elements and comments formulated with regard to the first version. “We knew our strengths and weaknesses and we wanted to be exhaustive, insofar as it was possible.”

At the same time, many concrete cases, that have also been updated, have been added to the book “because we had to fulfil what was asked of us and take into account the suggestions we had received from the users of our book”, the author points out.

"At least 90%" of these cases are the result of interventions carried out in companies by Lentic (the University of Liège’s Laboratoire d'études sur les nouvelles technologies, l'innovation et le changement) because this provides us with very interesting ‘raw material’ for our work". Some of them are Belgian but there are also some major French companies, which are often at the origin of procurement contracts for which the research centre is approached.

All these elements, new analyses, new references and new cases have therefore restructured the book. It offers a renewed typology of human resources management models that can be found in the life of organisations.

(1) François Pichault, Jean Nizet, Les pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines. Conventions, contextes et jeux d’acteurs, 2013, Ed. Le Seuil, Paris ( 2e éd.), 350 pages