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This paper aims to examine the ethics of authentic talent development in socioeconomic context by considering a set of alternative ethical frameworks. It juxtaposes the ideals of civic virtue, which involve a concern for the common good, with the reality that socioeconomic deprivation and sociocultural practices severely constrain talent development opportunities and choice.

The paper draws on several frameworks complementary to the ideals of civic virtue – the basic goods approach, human capital theory, the capabilities approach and the ethic of care – to elucidate the barriers to talent development embodied in sociocultural context, as well as policy and institutional practices to overcoming these barriers.

While multiple ethical frameworks are necessary to fully capture the issues related to authentic talent development in socioeconomic context, a focus on the ethic of care and basic goods provision is an important starting point. There are also a few fundamental starting points for human resource development in responding to ethical concerns regarding authentic talent development.

While the prevailing approach to talent development is implicitly based on a logic of social identity ascription, this paper promotes an alternative approach based on the ethics of civic virtue. While the former is oriented to the support of social hierarchies based on identity, the latter is oriented to fostering both social and human well-being via choice and authentic talent development.

Transaction cost economics sees a broad spectrum of governance structures spanned by two types of economic adaptation: autonomous and cooperative. Stakeholder theorists have drawn much inspiration from transaction cost economics but have not paid explicit attention to the centrality of the idea of adaptation in this literature. This study aims to address this gap.

The authors develop a novel conceptual framework applying the distinction between the two types of economic adaptation to stakeholder theory.

The authors argue that the idea of cooperative adaptation is particularly useful for describing the firm’s collaboration with primary stakeholders in the joint value creation process. In contrast, autonomous adaptation is more relevant for firms interacting with secondary stakeholders who are not directly engaged in joint value creation and may not have formal contractual relationships with the firm. Accordingly, cooperative adaptation can be seen as vital for resolving team production problems affecting joint value creation, whereas autonomous adaptation addresses how the firm maintains legitimacy within the larger stakeholder environment.

Similar to its significance for transaction cost economics, the distinction between the two types of adaptation equips stakeholder theory with a new systematic understanding of a potentially broad spectrum of firm–stakeholder collaboration forms.