Managing Talent

A Critical Appreciation

Stephen Swailes

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839090950
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Scholarly literature on talent management usually takes a mainstream approach to understanding how and why organizations pursue talent initiatives and to rationalizing their presumed benefits. Indeed, the basic logic of identifying and supporting an organization's most talented employees is, on the surface, quite seductive. Recent conceptual and empirical research, however, shows that talent management brings with it a range of issues that should trouble both academics and practitioners. In response to these concerns, Managing Talent: A Critical Appreciation takes a more critical view of the organizational talent project, to understanding the motives for talent management and to the identification, development and placement of high potential employees.
This edited text brings together and explores a range of concerns arising from theory and practice and offers both practical recommendations and implications for further research.
The issues and questions examined include:

• the rhetoric, politics and reality of talent management
• leadership derailment
• the social construction of talent
• gender bias in talent recognition
• the relevance of research in talent management
• inclusive talent management
• the role of line managers and leadership in implementing talent management

While stressing academic rigour, each chapter is accessible to both scholars and practitioners who are looking for alternative ways of thinking about talent and alternative perspectives on the often problematic issues arising from managing talent in practice.

Chapter 1

Arbitrariness, Individuality, and the Absence of Work Identity in Talent Management

Stephen Swailes

The semantic emptiness of the concept of talent has led to an arbitrary understanding of talent as something undefinable and associated with the individuality of talent and dissociated from the work identity. This dissociation between talent and work identity in talent management in part accounts for the arbitrariness in talent recruitment and selection, which is the focus of this short chapter. Using an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on insights from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, this chapter conducts a philosophical investigation of the concept of talent and its dissociation from work identity and seeks to explain the impacts on talent recruitment and selection.

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In the preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein (2010) claims that the method for formulating the problems of philosophy ‘rest on a misunderstanding of the logic of our language’ (p. 23). Since Wittgenstein realised this misunderstanding, he was convinced that he was the only philosopher who could identify (formulate) the true problem of philosophy. Solving this problem would render philosophy a discipline of the past, and science could fully take over, allowing Wittgenstein to retire, which he did for a while.

This problem of philosophy is what the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus addressed. Wittgenstein (2010) believed that the single, primary problem of philosophy arose from a limitation of thinking or more specifically,

The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather – not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of the limit (we should, therefore, have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense. (p. 23)

Worded differently, this limit in philosophy can only be identified using spoken language with ‘what can be said at all, can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (Mualem, 2002; Wittgenstein, 2010, p. 23).

What Wittgenstein meant has been discussed for decades. When asked to clarify his meaning, he often became frustrated because he believed his description of the problem was obvious (Ground & Flowers, 2015; Mualem, 2002). However, as with much of what Wittgenstein wrote, his meaning was not obvious. As such, the philosophical club, the Vienna Circle led by Bertrand Russell, stated that philosophy and science should focus on ideas that could be measured, categorised, and spoken about in a referential observable way (Mualem, 2002). Wittgenstein, who was also a member of the Circle, disagreed with Russell and other members because such a belief contrasted with his claims regarding philosophy.

Instead, it appears what he meant was that some matters, for instance, God and feelings, cannot be discussed clearly and unambiguously. Despite such matters being important to him, he considered them to belong ‘on the other side of the limit’ and as something that we cannot talk about in an unambiguously and referential way – at least not when it comes to the expression of propositions (Mualem, 2002).

Talent Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent

Since the establishment of talent management as an independent discipline in the late 1990s, the very foundation of the discipline, talent and the existence of talent in the actual world, is a matter that lies beyond the limit – ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. Lewis and Heckman (2006) noted an evident lack of semantic clarity in the compound phrase ‘talent management’ and Tansley (2011) demonstrated how the meaning of the term ‘talent’ itself is blurry and difficult to define.

Adamsen (2016, p. 122) considered the blurriness of the meaning of ‘talent’ and demonstrated that the term had become an empty signifier of which one cannot speak. The continued use of the term has led to ‘talent’ becoming a magic word rather than a lexical one and ‘talent’ is used to symbolise faith in something or someone rather than encapsulate actual knowledge (Adamsen, 2014). The practical consequences of using talent as an empty signifier leads to management practice, identification, recruitment, and selection of talent, being impacted by a subjective bias rather than a factual understanding:

Empty signifiers of this kind function to express the speaker’s belief in something or someone, belief that – and this is crucial – is not grounded in evidence-based argument of the kind favored by science. This would degrade or reduce its semiotic significance to something mundane and concrete. These two characteristics of empty signifiers – referential emptiness and magical or religious semantic significance – mean that they are symbols of collective faith, and refer to cultural abstracta, religious wisdom, or adagia of historical events. This is appropriate and important for words like ‘mana’, ‘sacred’, and so on, which have a real function in religious belief systems, but it is a problem in the case of ‘talent’, which ought to be a mundane, concrete term that is not referentially empty. (Adamsen, 2016, p. 122)

The Subjective Bias and the Dysfunctionality of Talent Management

Lewis and Heckman (2006), Tansley (2011), and Adamsen (2016, 2019) noted that variations in talent performances have not been associated with or related to the semantic emptiness of the term ‘talent’ or the use of the term as a magical concept. When Peter Cappelli (2008) started to question the functionality of talent management as a discipline that utilises knowledge and methodology to identify and select talent, his work identified fundamental issues within talent management. What Cappelli (2008) observed were the inadequacies and shortcomings of talent management methods that contributed to massive deficiencies in the ability or organisations to accurately identify and recruit talent,

‘Failure in talent management is a source of pain for executives in modern organizations. Over the past generation, talent management practices, especially in the United States, have by and large been dysfunctional, leading corporations to lurch from surpluses of talent to shortfalls to surpluses and back again. (p. 1)

However, Cappelli did not connect the dysfunctionality in talent management with the semantic emptiness of the term and the arbitrary understanding of ‘talent’ that follows. Silzer and Dowel (2010), on the contrary, demonstrated how this observed inadequacy and inefficacy of management practices are related to the subjective biases that individual talent managers bring to their work.

Over recent years, companies have widely adopted talent management programs and processes in an effort to attract, select and develop, deploy, engage, and retain talented employees who can help achieve business objectives. (…) Although the term talent management is becoming more widely used, it does not have a single clear definition. Discussions about talent management often focus on what processes or what components are included and what type of talents are managed. The term is often used informally without any specific definition. (Silzer & Dowell, 2010, p. XXI, p. 14)

Individuality and the Absence of Work Identity in Talent Management

Furthermore, the inadequacy and inefficacy of management practices can be directly related to the absence of social identity in talent management, an absence that is causally connected to the transformation of the term ‘talent’ into an empty signifier. In fact, since first appearing as an empty signifier in the fourteenth century, the meaning of ‘talent’ has been replaced by several meanings, for example, individuals, innate gifts, God, and actions elucidated in Christian narratives (Adamsen, 2016, 2019).

For example, in the gospel of Matthew, talent is the ‘gift’ provided by God – God-given talent – to certain ‘individuals’ who then should be treated as such; ‘To anyone who has, more will be given, and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away’. Almost all connotative meanings associated with the term ‘talent’ in Christian narratives are generally associated with individuals or something an individual possesses or received from a metaphysical force (Kilger, 2019).

Therefore, there exists a common semantic denominator between the multiple accidental connotative meanings of ‘talent’, which also point to the individuality of the term. Talent is embedded in individuality and personal identity, and the semantic denominator explains why talent is concomitant with personal identity and not with social identity (e.g., work identity). Moreover, these observations help to explain why work identity is absent from contemporary talent management practices.

The absence of work identity in talent management exposes a dissociation between talent and work identity that reinforces the arbitrary understanding of talent as something innate rather than acquired. Compared to work identity, the individuality or personal identity of talent is an ‘I-based-concept’ that refers to you as an individual and a talent, without specifying with any precision what talent means. It is left to subjective interpretation rather than objective conditions to determine who has the (necessary) talent to f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Arbitrariness, Individuality, and the Absence of Work Identity in Talent Management
• Chapter 2: Social and Natural Constituents of Talent: A Critical Appreciation
• Chapter 3: Some Critical Reflections on the Relevance of Talent Management Research
• Chapter 4: The Rhetoric, Politics and Reality of Talent Management: Insider Perspectives
• Chapter 5: Leadership Derailment: A Neglected Field in Talent Management
• Chapter 6: The Missing Link: The Role of Line Managers and Leadership in Implementing Talent Management
• Chapter 7: How Inclusive Can Exclusive Talent Management Be?
• Chapter 8: Critical Feminist Organisation Studies and Talent Management: Re-imagining Transnational, Intersectional and Postcolonial Agendas
• Chapter 9: The Paradox of Attracting Key Talent in the Canadian Cannabis Industry: Turning Over a New Leaf
• Index