The Missing American Voice in International HR Research — A Program Committee Perspective

Walk the halls of most international HR research conferences and you will notice something within the first hour: the Americans are missing. Not entirely, of course — but in numbers wildly disproportionate to the size, funding, and influence of the US academic and corporate HR establishment.

The data from our own program bears this out. Of the more than 600 abstracts submitted to ICFHR 2022, fewer than 9 percent came from US-based institutions. Compare that to submissions from the Netherlands, a country with roughly one-twentieth the population. This is not an isolated anomaly; peer conferences in the field report similar patterns. For a discipline that claims global relevance, the evidence base is surprisingly lopsided.

Why the Gap Matters

Some might shrug. Good research is good research, wherever it originates. But HR phenomena are deeply context-dependent, and the contexts being studied are not representative of the workplaces most Americans work in.

Consider three structural differences. First, the United States is the only advanced economy without statutory paid parental leave, which makes American family-leave research a natural experiment the rest of the world cannot replicate. Second, US healthcare is overwhelmingly employer-sponsored, meaning benefits design here carries stakes — retention, wellness, cost — that simply do not exist in single-payer systems. Third, at-will employment, union density below 11 percent, and a uniquely litigious compliance environment shape American HR practice in ways that European models do not capture.

When these contexts go unstudied in international forums, two things happen. Global findings get exported to the US without adaptation, and American insights — which could stress-test universal claims — never enter the conversation. Both outcomes weaken the science.

What International Attendees Told Us

In conversations with delegates at this year's conference, we heard a consistent refrain. European and Asian researchers were not indifferent to American perspectives; they were curious about them. A labor economist from Copenhagen put it plainly: "We generalize from our samples and call it universal. I would welcome the chance to be proven wrong by US data."

A delegation from a Singapore-based multinational described the practical frustration of designing global talent programs from a research base that skews heavily toward one region. "We're building policy for 40 countries using evidence from six," one HR director noted. "The US is our largest employee population and the least represented in the literature we read."

Why Americans Stay Home

We do not believe the gap reflects disinterest so much as incentives. US scholars face tenure clocks that reward top-tier domestic journals. Practitioners face travel budgets that shrank after 2020 and have not fully recovered. And there is a quieter assumption at work: that American HR research is already dominant, so attending internationally adds little. The submission data suggests otherwise — the dominance is in citation counts, not in the rooms where research is actually debated and refined.

A Case for Showing Up

The argument for broader American participation is not that US practices should dominate the field. It is the opposite. The most valuable contributions at ICFHR 2022 came from friction — from a German works-council study challenging a US engagement framework, from a Japanese lifetime-employment dataset complicating Western turnover models. American voices belong in that friction, both to contribute and to be challenged.

For practitioners, the case is even simpler. Multinationals headquartered in the US employ roughly one in five workers at Fortune Global 500 firms. The research questions those firms face — global mobility, cross-border benefits, culturally adaptive performance management — are being answered right now in conference rooms like ours, largely without American input.

What We Are Doing About It

Beginning with the next conference cycle, the Program Committee is establishing dedicated travel scholarships for US-based early-career researchers and practitioner-track submissions, a practitioner advisory panel with reserved committee seats, and joint-award categories prioritizing cross-national collaboration between US and international research teams.

Global HR research needs American voices — not to lead the conversation, but to complete it. We hope the field's largest HR community will take its seat at the table.