The Language of Talent

Abstract

In the late 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, ‘talent management’ became a widespread term referring to an emerging discipline in management and social science. At the same time, the term ‘talent’ enjoyed a considerable revival in everyday language, and became frequently used to describe high performers or high-potential individuals, or people who are somehow even more capable than those terms suggest. Even among researchers in scientific disciplines, the terms ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ became frequently used to describe the ‘core assets’ of organizations and teams, and to refer to a new (sub)discipline of human resource management. For some time, I have been looking for a way to provide empirical evidence for the extent of this development in the usage of ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ in everyday language, and in this chapter I present the results of my own recent investigation. I analysed commercially popular Danish newspapers in terms of the frequency and nature of their uses of both terms in business and non-business-specific articles — that is, in regular, everyday contexts. I also used Google Scholar to give an empirically grounded picture of how often the terms are used in scientific discourse. In both cases, we see clear evidence of the trend I have just described.