About

History

CRANET started out as an idea of Gavin Adam, then-partner in the HRM practice of Price Waterhouse in the UK. Adam contacted Professor Chris Brewster at the Cranfield School of Management (the original home of CRANET) and together they persuaded prestigious universities and business schools in five countries (France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) to conduct the survey.

Initially, the survey was conducted every year, but there was not enough time to carry out properly rigorous HRM analysis between the rounds. Beyond this, HRM policies and practices did not change that fast. The survey was switched to its current multi-year cycle.

After the first three years, Price Waterhouse withdrew their support and the academic members found their own funding in each country to continue the project. The number of members grew each year. In the beginning, members had to be persuaded to join. Soon after, countries started applying to join. The problem became not one of finding members, but of applying rigorous standards to ensure that the applicant members complemented those already in the network.

The increasing number of countries also brought changes. First, when the number of countries involved was relatively small, all members participated in the questionnaire design which allowed for variation in each round. This practice became unwieldy with more countries, so now a multicultural volunteer working group representing all the members designs the questionnaire.

Second, a threshold for respondent organizations with 200 employees was chosen because the literature said that was the size below which organizations tended not to have specialist HRM departments. It became clear that this was not the case in smaller countries, which pressed for the threshold to go down to 100 employees.

Third, there was much discussion about the nature of the Network. As it developed, each member maintained ownership of their data and could only work with other countries’ data when given permission. This method is effective though, as the members all share a common curiosity about comparative HRM and are prepared to work together and compromise when necessary. 

Articles based on the CRANET data have been published in some of the world’s top journals and presented at some of the most prestigious academic conferences globally. CRANET is also proud to have presented its data at practitioner conferences internationally and to have had it published in local journals, newspapers, and through the broadcast media.

After 30 years of being based in the UK, the home of CRANET transferred to the U.S. in 2021 to the Center for International Human Resource Studies at Penn State.

Purpose

The purpose of CRANET has not changed since its inception. The objective was and is to gather hard evidence, in the local language, about how HRM policies and practices vary between countries and to see how they change. Whenever possible, the questionnaire collects facts rather than opinions.

The number of countries continues to grow, and the rigor of the academic work on the data increases. However, there is evidence that such a lengthy and complex questionnaire is generating fewer respondents. The Network has proven its value but challenging times lie ahead as the future of the survey is discussed.

CRANET Countries 

CRANET is now the largest HRM network in the world and the only one that has been collecting comparative data on HRM in different countries for over three decades. The interactive chart below shows the different countries that have been involved over the decades and the years that they participated in survey rounds.