Talking about Talent Development in Professional Services: An Australian Case Study

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that by examining the discursive elements in talk about talent management we can contribute to our understanding of how organisations construct and enact talent management systems. We focus on a professional services firm, as our illustrative qualitative case study, to highlight the discursive strategies employed to legitimate talent management and the allocation of organisational resources to develop talent. Our findings illustrate how actors framed talent development as an activity which not only sought to prepare talent for promotion, but acted as a mechanism to evaluate and judge the quality of the talent pool. In this way, our study contributes to an understanding of how talent management discourse brings talent management concepts into existence, how they are manifest in organisational objects and talent development practices, and how the examination of the language and talk about talent development is integral to the study of talent management.