Macro talent management theorizing: transnational perspectives of the political economy of talent formation in the Arab Middle East

Abstract

Challenging dominant Global North trajectories, we critically explore the complex terrain of global talent debates. We contribute new theoretical insights to the Macro Talent Management (MTM) field by examining the complexity of Talent Management (TM) through a transnational and political economy of skill formation lens. We provide a macro assessment of TM processes, at different scales (i.e. Local, National and Transnational) and explore the myriad partners in devising TM strategy that existing scholarship has not sufficiently examined. We explore the complexities of economic organization and highlight that TM theorising would benefit from spatialized accounts, and the politics of location in shaping TM logics and ideas, embedded in the geographies of transnational organizing. We take the Arab Middle East as a case in point to highlight the deficiency of current Macro Talent Management models and proffer a new multi-level model at global, national and local to reflect the dimensions of Talent Management realities in the Arab Middle East, and indeed other developing regions. We are driven by a concern that Talent Management theorization is rooted in a neoliberal ethic and rarely considers how the local becomes global, and how the global is articulated in the local.