Abstract
International Chinese language education (ICLE) has quietly grown into an unusually diverse sector. A state-backed Confucius Institute embedded in a European university has almost nothing operationally in common with a Shanghai-based online academy selling one-to-one lessons, or with a weekend heritage school in suburban Toronto — yet the modest body of human resource research that touches on the field tends to treat them as variants of a common template. The template is the problem. Drawing on configurational theory in organization studies, this paper argues that ICLE institutions cluster into four ideal-typical configurations — Diplomatic-Institutional, Market-Commercial, Hybrid-Partnership, and Community-Voluntary — and that each configuration calls for its own bundle of recruitment, training, compensation, and retention practices. The typology is developed through a review of recent strategic HRM literature and illustrative institutional cases from 2018 to 2024. Two patterns come through. HR effectiveness in ICLE turns on fit between practice bundles and configuration, not on any universal set of best practices; imported bundles travel poorly across configurational boundaries. And institutions that mix logics without aligning the underlying HR systems tend to accumulate coordination costs that surface, eventually, as unplanned attrition. The contribution is a configurational vocabulary for a field whose HR debates have largely been framed in universalist terms.