Green Human Resource Management in Maritime and Logistics Operations: A Sector-Ranked Analysis and Synthesis of an Emerging Literature

Abstract

Green human resource management has grown into a large literature, and its distribution across industry sectors has not been measured. This paper establishes that distribution and synthesises what the maritime portion of it contains. A corpus of 3,887 journal articles was assembled from OpenAlex and screened, and eight industry sectors were measured with symmetrical term lists. Maritime and logistics operations rank 8th of eight at 0.93% of the field, against 10.96% for hospitality and tourism, a 11.8-fold difference. Two further findings follow. The field as a whole engages recruitment channels in 0.57% of its output and employer branding in 1.29%, although green recruitment is one of its core constructs. Within the maritime evidence base, 13 studies were identified, of which all but one date from 2024 onward. Those studies share no common outcome variable, rely almost entirely on cross-sectional variance models, sample seafarers in only two cases, and disagree on which green human resource management dimension carries the strongest effect. No study of recruitment channels or employer branding appears in the maritime subset, and the paper sets out why that count is uninformative about sector-level neglect at this subset size. The contribution is a measured denominator for a field that has been described only in aggregate, and the first synthesis of its maritime component.