Contemporary critiques of talent management highlight a limited focus on those excluded from talent pools, insufficient attention to gendered implications, and inadequate consideration of organisational context. This thesis addresses these omissions through a feminist study of talent management practice within a large UK police force.
Drawing on documentary and thematic analysis of thirty-six loosely structured interviews, findings demonstrate the gendered nature of talent management and confirm the significant role of organisational context in shaping understandings of talent and talent management (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2020; Thunnissen and Boselie, 2024). The policing context permeated formal talent management documentation, practice, and documentation lacunae, producing both explicit (documented) and implicit forms of gendering. Talent management practice became infused with an idealised, unencumbered, physically strong male worker (Acker, 1990; 1992), capable of extreme-hours working, reflecting deeply embedded gendered mental models, discourse, subjectivities, and practices.
This thesis problematises the simplistic application of the Resource-Based View (Barney, 1991) as a theoretical foundation for talent management, highlighting its dark side and the unanticipated and often undesirable consequences of such approaches. These include gendered practices and differential impacts on both those included within talent pools and those excluded. Talent management practice was found to be politicised, with a novel finding identifying the capacity of elite talent to deploy political tactics for personal advantage. Critically, talent management was shown to perform talent rather than merely identify it, rendering talent pool inclusion self-reinforcing.
Individuals navigated work–home conflict arising from talent expectations through three coping strategies: Accommodating and Adapting (meeting extreme work demands by adjusting work or non-work arrangements); Working Hard and Having it All (accepting the prevailing gender order and intensifying effort across work and non-work domains); and Adopting a Gender-Blind Perspective (either ignoring gendered dynamics altogether or attributing them to women themselves, without consideration of wider structural factors).
