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HRM 2 / TRANSFER OF HR MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
Introduction
The transfer of Human Resource (HR) Management practices across national boundaries has become a key strategy for multinational companies to achieve competitive advantage in global markets. The 2 articles bring teaching methods on the conditions of application and of transferability of these practices.

Today, for many strategic or marketing reasons, companies are internationalizing their activity. Moreover, during the last decades, companies have been dealing with an increasingly competitive environment. Factors facilitating the globalisation, such as the liberalization of international trade, the international integration of production, etc have enabled companies to invest overseas in order to gain competitive advantage.

In this context, HRM could be seen as part of the overall strategy of the firm and an emerging source of competitive advantage. Furthermore, values and HR system might help to shape the organizational culture and the people who operate within and influence that culture. On the other hand it is assumed that HRM constitutes a major constraint in implementing global strategies, because of the complexities involved in employing and managing people from disparate national and cultural background.

Nevertheless, the transfer of HRM practices to overseas subsidiaries is limited by differences in national cultural and institutional characteristics, which might force MNCs to localize their HRM practices. So, this internationalising process includes the partial or integral transfer of their know -how including and generally their HRM practices. HRM practices represent the policies, procedures, systems and activities used to shape, monitor, and direct attention of people within the organization. Several frameworks have been developed in the strategic human resource management literature to classify HRM practices, where five major