Name: Chujun Du

Tutor: Geraldin Hogan

Student ID: 18120318


Title I chose: HR Practice in a recession
Research question: HR Practice in Cost Reduction during The Period of Recession
6 key words: HR, recession, cost reduction, downsizing, outsource, happiness

I divided my research question into three small parts which relate to HR practice in cost reduction:
HR practice in a) downsizing b)outsourcing c) employees’ happiness. All the reference that I chose
are related to these three small topics which are belong to research question HR practice in cost
reduction. I chose report Human Resources in the Recession: Managing and Representing People at
Work in Ireland (Roche et al. 2011) because it is about HR practice in recession and it emphasises
the importance of both HR practice in downsizing and outsourcing in recession which relate to my
topic. For example I can cite sentence “Recruitment, selection and retention, core concerns of HR
during the boom, no longer assume such importance, and have been displaced, or eclipsed, by
controlling pay-roll costs and downsizing” (Roche et al. 2011) to hi-light the importance of
downsizing HR practice in a recession. And then I can use the figure “The study of senior managers
at 125 of the top IT spending organisations in the UK suggested that 63 per cent are looking to
outsource more, compared to 54 per cent the previous year.” from news UK firms more likely to
outsource during recession(Lytle 2009) together with “In concrete terms, this means that HR
managers should continue to create a leaner HR department by outsourcing various HR functions,
particularly those of a transactional nature.” (Roche et al. 2011) to show that outsourcing HR
practice is significant in the recession and start the topic because the news in 2009 would be
persuasive especially with numbers. After that I can use journal article sentence “Therefore, the
present study investigates whether employees’ happiness at work had been influenced by HRM
practices adopted during the recession period of 2008-2010.”(Wickramasinghe and Perera 2012)
combining with plot and sentences from movie Outsourced to start topic how HR practice work for
employee happiness in a recession.
Reference
Carbery, R. and Cross, C.(2013) Human Resource Management: A Concise Introduction, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glick, B. (2009) ‘UK firms more likely to outsource during recession’, Computing, available:
https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1833412/uk-firms-outsource-recession [accessed 22 Oct
2018].

Jeffcoat, J. (2006) Outsourced [film], United States: ShadowCatcher Entertainment.

Lytle, T.(2017) How HR Can Prepare for the Next Recession, Society for Human Resource
Management, available:https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0317/pages/how-hr-can-
prepare-for-the-next-recession.aspx [accessed 22 Oct 2018].

McDevitt, R., Giapponi, C. and Houston, D.(2013) ‘Organizational Downsizing During an

Economic Crisis: Survivors' and Victims' Perspectives’, Management Journal, 10(4), 227-239,
available: https://doi.org/10.1080/15416518.2013.859057.

Roche, W., Teague, P., Coughlan, A., and Fahy, M. (2011) Human Resources in the Recession:
Managing and Representing People at Work in Ireland, internal LRC report, unpublished.

Wickramasinghe, V. and Perera, G. (2012) ‘HRM practices during the global recession
(2008-2010): Evidence from globally distributed software development firms in Sri Lanka’,
Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal, 5(3), 188-212, available:https://doi.org/
10.1108/17538291211291747 .