Human resources

The economist John R. Commons may have been the first to use the term "human resource" in print, in 1893. The concept remained largely academic until the mid-twentieth century, when the language of personnel management began to shift. E. Wight Bakke used the phrase in his 1958 book The Human Resources Function, and Peter Drucker popularized the concept of human resources in his 1954 book The Practice of Management, though in a broader sense.

The first formal personnel department is generally attributed to the National Cash Register Company, where owner John Henry Patterson organized it around 1900 to deal with grievances, discharges, safety, and training supervisors on new laws and practices. By 1915, only five percent of large American companies had such departments. By 1920, that figure had reached twenty percent. The function grew steadily through both World Wars, as labor shortages required more systematic approaches to hiring, training, and retaining workers.

The shift from "personnel" to "human resources" accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, driven by civil rights legislation, the growth of employment law, and changing ideas about the strategic role of workforce management. The American Society for Personnel Administration, founded in 1948, eventually became the Society for Human Resource Management. By the 1980s, the field had reframed itself from an administrative function focused on payroll and compliance into a strategic discipline concerned with talent management, employee engagement, and organizational culture.

Some companies have begun renaming the function. Labels such as "people operations," "culture department," and "talent team" reflect a growing discomfort with the framing embedded in the original term. The linguistic logic remains visible in the older name: people are resources, and resources exist to be managed.