Manpower (or, human resource) planning is concerned with the quantitative aspects of the supply of and demand for people in employment. At one extreme this might include the whole working population of a country, but it has been most successful when applied to smaller, more homogeneous systems like individual firms or professions. The term manpower planning appears to date from the 1960s though many of the ideas can be traced back much further. In recent years terms such as Workforce Panning and Personnel Planning have been used in the same sense. A history of the subject up to the 1980s,from a U.K. perspective,will be found in Smith and Bartholomew (1988). The literature of the subject is very scattered reflecting the diverse disciplinary origins of the practitioners, but most of the technical material is to be found in the journals of operations research, probability, and statistics. There was an initial surge of publication in the late 1960s and early 1970s and since.
