José Nuno Matos

The making of Portuguese Human Resources Management (1959-1986): regime change and the prevalence of normative discourse

Abstract The development of Human Resources Management in Portugal reveals how national features may prevent or postpone the adoption of mainstream management models. Based on an analysis of the magazines Indústria Portuguesa, edited by the Portuguese Industrial Association, and Pessoal, by the Association of Portuguese Human Resources Technicians and Managers, this paper aims to understand how political events in the period between 1959 and 1986 came to shape a very distinctive configuration of management discourses. Contrary to what happened in more developed countries, the political effort to modernize productive structures, from the end of the 1950s, and the onset of the revolutionary process in 1974, in the wake of the fall of the authoritarian regime, determined the pervasiveness of normative concepts. Only in the mid-1980s, faced with a new political scenario and against the backdrop of a new shape of the labor movement, would Portuguese management lay emphasis on rational procedures.