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The purpose of this paper is to provide an inside-out perspective on the practices and effects of talent management (TM) in a multinational organization.

The study adopts an autoethnographic approach focusing on the experiences of the first author during her employment in a multinational organization. This approach contributes to the literature by providing an insider talent perspective that thus far has not been presented in TM research.

Applying autoethnography as a means to address the inside-out perspective in TM reveals a tension. The authors label this phenomenon the “talent paradox,” defined as the mix of simultaneously occurring opportunities and risks for individuals identified and celebrated as a talent.

The paper may be of value to TM scholars and practitioners, as well as to employees who have been identified as high potentials or talents in their organizations. In contrast with the TM literature’s optimism, the findings illuminate that being identified as a talent may paradoxically produce both empowerment and powerlessness. Attending to personal aspects of TM processes is relevant for organizations as well as for individuals as it enables reflection and sensemaking.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the interplay between discourse, policy and practice in relation to aspects of organization and processes of organizing.

Provides an introduction to the six contributions contained in this special issue and discusses how they relate to the core theme.

Highlights the need for an approach which treats discourses, policies and practices as connected and mutually implicated, rather than discrete, phenomena.

Presents an approach to discourse analysis which promotes an engagement with wider aspects of social activity.

This article seeks to further understand the significance of “organizational nostalgia” for processes of organizational change and to develop the mirror concept “managerial postalgia”. If nostalgia is a longing for a paradisical past, postalgia refers to a longing for a heavenly future, a desire that is central to change‐talk and change‐initiatives in organizations. The meaning and role of postalgia will be clarified in this paper by comparing and contrasting it with organizational nostalgia and by analyzing ethnographic studies that provide empirical support to substantiate the analogy. It is argued that the glorification of the past, just as the idealization of the future, are part of internal struggles in which organizational actors try to instigate or resist change by praising or dispraising the collective past, present and future. The argumentation demonstrates the significance of temporal constructions of change and continuity through organizational discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to briefly explore some recent curious interlocking of the ideology of markets and the practice of policy.

This particular discursive combine has most visibly been apparent in the concatenated birth and death of the US Defense Department's so‐called “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM). Yet PAM is but the most notorious example of a more sustained and pervasive attempt to use the technologies and disciplines of markets to render policy both better informed and more amenable to control through robust and seemingly incontestable systems of accountability. Given its prominence, our way in is through a brief description of PAM's origins and demise.

It is found that PAM and its similar brethren of markets for use in policy formation and judgement are less concerned with the capture of reality and more with the disciplining power of a curious “objectivity”.

Projects such as PAM are thus not easily challengeable on grounds of their veracity. Rather research that seeks to interrogate the use of market technologies in policy must look to their context and effects.

To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo‐liberal project of governance.

Using an analytics of governmentality, this paper interrogates US government discourse on the war in Iraq, focusing on a series of Department of Defense documents entitled Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (MSSI).

Through the use of New Public Management techniques, the MSSI reports render the war in Iraq in depoliticized, decontextualized, apolitical and amoral terms. Such a rendering does an unacceptable violence to the experiences of those living in the war zone and to the complex context of US military involvement in Iraq.

Neo‐liberal regimes of knowledge and practice are ubiquitous, perhaps even hegemonic. This analysis disturbs the neat logic of neo‐liberalism and seeks to reinsert the troubling bodies, both political and material, which such a logic obviates. In so doing, it problematizes both the deployment of neo‐liberal regimes of knowledge production and critics’ easy dismissal of the War on Terror as an evanescent discursive construction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Dutch social workers make sense of the cultural otherness produced by clients with migrant origins and relates this to the various discourses that constitute the legacy of Dutch social work.

The paper relies on a historical discourse analysis based on secondary sources and on a fieldwork study performed in a contemporary organization.

The analysis reveals three different discourses. The first relates to how the association of social work with government policy produces a generalised “otherness” as the practical starting point for the social workers’ interventions, and a specific kind of cultural indifference. The second concerns a discourse around lifestyle interventions influenced by a specific tradition of institutionalised diversity called pillarization. Finally, there is a discourse in which social workers are expressly expected to be “open” to their individual clients’ specific backgrounds which generates scope for a “constructivist” conceptualization of cultural diversity.

The paper offers insights into the discursive construction of social work.

The institutionalisation of neo‐liberalist discourse has significantly changed the way in which the relationship between government and community organisations is described and regulated in Australia. These changes are most clearly articulated in government policy discourse as a move away from “funding” community service organisations to “purchasing” the delivery of community services. This research aims to explore institutionalisation in the community sector: how institutionalisation interplays with increased central control, the impact on practice and the continued relevance of community organisations.

This research applies critical discourse analysis, within the framework of neo‐institutional theory, to examine data from “conversations” with workers in community organisations.

Imposed institutionalisation, seen to threaten flexibility and autonomy, is spurned. However, some evidence of increased internal institutionalisation revealed some potential to strengthen the sector from within.

Due to significant devolution of government services, the extent of welfare provision provided by community organisations is now so great that a crisis in the community sector would result in severe disruption in the delivery of welfare services in Australia. An examination of how the community sector can be resilient and relevant in this new policy environment has important practical implications at the local and international level.

The purpose of this paper is to examine critically both utopian and dystopian discourses of offshoring so that a more considered, nonetheless theoretically informed, view of the global offshore phenomenon can be formed.

Drawing upon some preliminary research on offshoring ventures from the UK to India, and the extant literature, the practice of business process outsourcing (BPO) via offshoring is explored and critiqued.

It is argued that neither dream nor nightmare is the adequate discursive metaphor to capture what we have discerned through our research on offshore outsourcing.

The primary contribution of this paper is that demonstrates that utopian and dystopian discourses fail to adequately explain the practice of offshore BPO and that in cultural, economical, ethical, and political terms, it is much more complex.

The paper aims to explore an affirmative, discursive perspective for its potential to expand the current understanding of processes of institutional transformation.

First the notion of institutional transformation is discussed and the “discursive model of institutionalization” as developed by Phillips et al. is described. Then the concept of “positive textual deviance” is introduced and defined. The discursive model is read to explore possibilities for institutional transformation through instances of positive textual deviance.

The insertion of the concept of positive textual deviance into the discursive model of institutionalization reveals openings for transformation which are captured in propositions that address the agency of texts and their authors in the creation of desired change.

The paper is unique in its synthesis of three distinct theoretical perspectives – institutional, discursive, and affirmative – in the definition and application of positive textual deviance. Its affirmative, constructionist stance goes beyond a critical deconstruction of taken for granted practice by proposing a hopeful, emancipatory approach that enables institutional actors to become agents of change.