The value of including employees: a pluralist perspective on sustainable HRM

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to advance a conceptualization of sustainable HRM that builds on scholarship focusing on the pluralistic nature of human resource management. The paper seeks to advance the promise of sustainable HRM as an alternative to HRM scholarship that adopts a unitarist frame of reference. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on a variety of HRM-related literatures to offer new insights about what a pluralist perspective on sustainable HRM from the perspective of employees would look like and what it would accomplish, and in so doing allow sustainable HRM to become socially sustainable. Findings Taking a pluralistic perspective is essential for making the concept of sustainable HRM more distinct and robust. Sustainable HRM can offer a challenge to the dominant unitarist perspective on the employment relationship, focusing the attention of researchers on the extent to which employment practices benefit both employers and employees while contributing to social sustainability outside of the employment context. Originality/value This paper adds analyses of pluralism and unitarism to the current literature on sustainable HRM while also focusing attention on how sustainable HRM might be more robustly conceptualized and also more normative in its orientation.