This article examines a range of frameworks, theories, and research contributions that throw some light on the goals of HRM. As a business school discipline, much of the literature in HRM is normative, designed to support management education and thus setting out an argument about what managers should do or, more modestly, offering an analytical framework to assist practitioners to shape their own policy prescriptions. Fortunately, it also contains studies that test the predictions of theoretical models and thus provide a descriptive picture of what employers actually do. The article reviews both normative and empirical contributions within the HRM canon but its prime objective is to outline the goals of HRM in practice and what needs further research.