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PurposeThe overall purpose of this paper is to explore the limits of HRM in public sector organisations, within the context of international public management. The cultural basis of HRM, derived chiefly from North America and Western Europe continues to underpin public sector HR reforms, aided and abetted by the international institutions. The paper seeks to begin with an overview of the impact of wider public sector reform on HR practice by briefly exploring the limitations of orthodox HRM in a public service setting. However, the main argument of the paper aims to follow the conceptual position that an understanding of the institutional and cultural contexts is required before attempting HRM‐type reforms.Design/methodology/approachThe author visited the Republic of Georgia in 2008 to work with the Public Service Commission on HRM reforms in central government. Thus, the paper presents the illustrative case of Georgia, which is both a transitional state and susceptible to Western ideas regarding public service reform. The case of Georgia is derived from observation, documentary analysis and correspondence from the Georgian Civil Service.FindingsThe paper found that, despite the acceptability of HRM and the desire by public officials to promote HRM‐based reforms, deep politicisation of the administrative system provided considerable implementation problems.Research limitations/implicationsThese took the form of lack of academic literature on Georgia, lack of resources to conduct further in‐depth interviews with key officials and difficulty of applying HR to the public sector in post‐Communist/transitory countriesPractical implicationsThe findings suggest that alternative approaches to HRM reform will be required in similar institutional contexts to that of the Republic of Georgia.Originality/valueThe paper challenges the popular notion of international convergence around "universally applicable" models of HRM in countries such as the Republic of Georgia, where the post‐Soviet legacy provides significant resistance to any reform momentum, HRM‐based or otherwise.

AbstractLittle attention is paid in most national asylum policies and legislation to the specific position of female asylum seekers, and to gendered aspects of refugee and asylum situations. Further, even in those countries that have adopted asylum legislation to specifically address the question of women asylum seekers and victims of gender specific persecution, problems still remain in the implementation of these policies and in the full recognition of persecutions specific to women. Whilst the issue of protection of women victims of this type of violence have been put on the international agenda, at least to some extent, through directives on the defence of women's human rights and on the protection of female refugees and asylum seekers, the international norms which have thus been created have been implemented unevenly and unequally in different national contexts. This article seeks to analyse the extent to which national asylum legislation and policies have integrated a concern with the protection of women victims of gender specific forms of persecution, and how effective this implementation has been. The article will engage critically with existing accounts of global norm creation to examine the uneven diffusion and implementation of norms on the protection of female refugees, pointing to the importance of discursive opportunity structures open to actors in mobilising around these issues at local and national levels. It will also argue that even where policies and legislation dealing specifically with women refugees and asylum seekers do exist, they may not actually address some of the important insecurities facing these women because of an approach that does not fully comprehend and act upon gendered structures and relations of power.