Abstract
The academic discourse on Socially Responsible Human Resource Management (SRHRM) has grown increasingly rich, marked by a tension between optimistic perspectives that highlight its benefits for employees and critical perspectives that view it as a potentially performative practice. This debate has largely overlooked entire geographic regions. This research addresses this gap by focusing on Morocco as a representative model for under-researched North African contexts. The study has two main objectives: first, investigate how the critical perspective on SRHRM applies within this specific geocultural setting. Second, it will compare the SRHRM approaches of local Moroccan companies with those of multinationals operating under international sustainability mandates. The central importance of this study lies in examining how local and international understandings of SRHRM converge or diverge in practice, and whether the Moroccan context ultimately support to the critical or the optimistic view of SRHRM's impact on employees.