As a new millennium approaches, many politicians, commentators, academics, management gurus and business people have been increasingly casting their gaze towards Asia in the belief that the 'Pacific Age' is also beckoning.
The region's dynamism is seen as rooted in particular managerial practices, such as kaizen and Total Quality Management; in state intervention; or in cultural factors, notably Confucianism. An integral ingredient to all these factors is the management of 'human resources', with the 'human touch' seen to proffer key advantages in an era of globalization, market flux, competition by quality and service, and rapid transference of technologies. Within the fashionable icon of human resource management, several debatable assumptions are sometimes made and often more heat than light has been shed. HRM often suffers from a selectivity tendency and ad hoc approach, which misses the historical, paradoxical and often incoherent, incompatible and inconsistent nature of the su