Talent Management: Quo Vadis?

The fundamental intellectual utility of talent management, coupled with its manifestations in professional practice, and how aspects of both might better be observed and understood, lie at the very heart of this special issue. In proposing the special issue originally, and in subsequently developing and framing our thinking in order to ensure that our initial ideas coalesced into a fully-fledged and coherent call for papers, we had several questions which we felt were worth pursuing and which ultimately informed that final call. Those questions can be broadly classified into three wideranging domains. Firstly, there were questions relating to the conceptualization, theoretical development and framing of the field. Secondly, there were those focused on the exact contours and anatomy of practice implementation and evaluation. Finally, there were particular questions centring on stakeholder perceptions and priorities related to talent management adoption. With respect to conceptualizing, developing theory and framing, we were especially interested in the theoretical utility of talent management and the evidence regarding the establishment of the boundaries of the phenomenon. In addition, we were curious about which theoretical lenses might offer particular explanatory power in explicating the mechanisms governing talent management systems, along with which specific constructs and research designs were being employed to capture talent management practices and their consequences for various stakeholders. Our questions on the contours of practice and its evaluation had an equally foundational quality. Here we were interested in exploring what the adoption of talent management within the organizational setting entails and how it has been witnessed. We were seeking to better understand whether empirical work supported practitioner claims about the value of talent management as a practice-led phenomenon. And we wondered about complementarities with other areas and whether the work on talent management served to advance previously generated insights from proximal fields such as strategic human resource planning and competency-based management. t r o