These are heady days for the human resources department. Consider for a moment the magnitude of the debates over the war for talent, human capital management, intellectual capital and the centrality of intangibles in accounting for the competitive advantage of organisations, and you are left nothing short of awe-struck as to the commercial importance of the human resources (HR) department. Surely now we can claim HR is finally at the boardroom table and not on it, to paraphrase one of the leading publications of the now burgeoning field of measuring the link between HR and organisation performance – something we refer to as the HRM–P link (Becker et al. 2001)?

A decade after Ulrich’s ‘Bloody Question’ at the beginning of Human Resource Champions (1997: 1), namely, ‘should we do away with HR?’, the HR department appears to have moved backwards in its bid for corporate recognition. The big-hitting business guru writers appear to agree. Rosebeth Moss Kanter has recently predicted ‘the demise of the HR function’ (Moss Kanter 2003: xi), merely bringing to organisational fruition the warning sounded by Jeffrey Pfeffer over a decade ago in which he warned the HR function was ‘entering a game where winning is unlikely and playing by the rules set by others exposes human resource professionals to the possibility of at best short-term victories and long-term problems’ (1997: 357).