Abstract
Common-Good Human Resource Management (CGHRM) has emerged within sustainable HRM scholarship as a proposed paradigm shift that elevates the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to a level equal to, or exceeding, market-driven performance objectives. Positioned as a morally grounded and stakeholder-oriented approach to managing people, CGHRM seeks to embed principles of fairness, participation, and collective welfare into organisational policy and practice. Nevertheless, ongoing debates raise questions concerning the construct’s empirical distinctiveness from broader sustainable HRM frameworks and its transferability across institutional environments marked by divergent stakeholder pressures, regulatory instability, and political volatility. This paper examines how CGHRM is enacted within a disrupted Global South setting, specifically, the Mongolian mining sector.
Drawing on an in-depth qualitative case study of a locally owned mining company operating alongside multinational actors such as Rio Tinto, the paper conceptualises CGHRM as a travelling normative template whose effectiveness depends upon translation through indigenous institutional logics. The analysis centres on the concept of nutgiin hun, which conveys moral obligations of stewardship and responsibility toward land and community. The case illustrates how HR practices, including prioritising local recruitment, investing in holistic workforce development from foundational life skills to advanced technical training, and embedding community participation into employment systems, acquire legitimacy when aligned with this locally embedded logic.
The paper argues that CGHRM becomes empirically distinctive not solely through definitional refinement but through institutional translation that mediates between common-good and personal-good performance under conditions of political volatility and institutional fragility. It seeks feedback on whether institutional translation provides a sufficiently robust theoretical mechanism for clarifying CGHRM’s distinctiveness and how the role of HR can be more explicitly theorised in shaping common-good outcomes in disrupted contexts.