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{{Paper
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|title=Talent management and the HRIS specialist: A narrative analysis
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-570/paper006.pdf
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==Talent management and the HRIS specialist: A narrative analysis==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-570/paper006.pdf
Talent management and the HRIS specialist: A narrative analysis
Carole Tansley, The Nottingham Trent University, UK
carole.tansley@ntu.ac.uk
Carley Foster, The Nottingham Trent University, UK
carley.foster@ntu.ac.uk
Abstract. Researchers are required to make methodological choices about
the underlying nature of phenomena being investigated, which appropriate
research methods to use and how to present valid evidence. Information
systems (IS) is a discipline originally rooted in a single overarching
perspective, the positivist/realist domain, but critics of such a narrow view
have encouraged a move towards more interpretive approaches in order to
understand human thought and action in social and organisational contexts.
Addressing this gap, we demonstrate, using examples from case study and
ethnographic research on human resourcing information systems (HRIS),
how four analytical „tools‟ (contextual narrative, personal narrative,
template analysis and evaluation) can be used to interpret respondents‟
accounts. It is found that narratives can provide a meaningful description of
events and experiences through time and go some way to encourage an
informed consideration of alternative approaches to the positivist research
dominating the IS domain. Critical reflections of narrative analysis are also
provided in the paper.
Keywords: Qualitative; ethnography: talent; narrative; template analysis.
1 Introduction
Those engaging in social science research have a range of research perspectives to
choose from [1, 18; 48; 51], offered by researchers from different disciplines
(sociology, anthropology, psychology, administrative science). However, such a range
of traditions has not been widely evident in the arena of IS research [50], which was
originally rooted in a single overarching perspective (the positivist/realist domain) that
exhibits a single set of philosophical assumptions regarding the underlying nature of
phenomena being investigated, the appropriate research methods to be used and the
nature of valid evidence. Critics of such a narrow view [65, 66, 34] encourage a move
towards more interpretive approaches [49] as they can help IS researchers to understand
human thought and action in social and organisational contexts [41]. To aid these fresh
approaches to studying IS work in greater depth, Currie and Gallier [23] also
recommend utilisation of methodological approaches from other disciplines. However,
this has only happened to a small degree in IS research [5, 6].
Strohmeier, S.; Diederichsen, A. (Eds.), Evidence-Based e-HRM? On the way to rigorous and relevant
research, Proceedings of the Third European Academic Workshop on electronic Human Resource
Management, Bamberg, Germany, May 20-21, 2010, CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073, Vol. 570, online:
CEUR-WS.org/Vol-570/ , pp. 72-89.
© 2010 for the individual papers by the papers´ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic
purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
In this paper we present a methodological story, derived from two studies (on talent
management and human resource information systems (HRIS)) undertaken between
2007 and 2009. This story consists of a reflexive journey of our interpretive research
practices derived from narratives from nine talent management case studies in the first
instance and a longitudinal ethnography in the second instance, where we examined
talent management at project team level on the HR component of a global, enterprise-
wide information system. We demonstrate the utility of such „tools‟ as template
analysis, context narrative and personal narrative analysis for understanding the context
and lived meaningful experience of those involved in IS work. We also discuss how
such research might be evaluated. This has produced lessons for talent management
practices generally, with prescriptions for the study of IS work in particular.
1.1 Narrative approaches and IS research
The „linguistic turn‟ across the social sciences has generated an increasing interest in
stories and narratives [31, 32, 55]. Narrative has been construed as „the meaning
structure that organizes events and human actions into a whole, thereby attributing
significance to individual actions and events according to their effect on the whole‟ [52,
p18]. Hinchman and Hinchman similarly take narratives to be „discourses with a clear
sequential order that connect events in a meaningful way for a definite audience and
thus offer insights about the world and/or people‟s experiences of it‟ [37, xvi]. One
constant debate is whether there should be delineation between a narrative and a story.
Scholars have not reached „consensus on how stories and narratives may be
distinguished from definitions, proverbs, myths, chronologies and other forms of oral
and written texts‟, but rather their „key concern is with accounts of sequenced events,
with plots that weave together complex occurrences into unified wholes that reveal
something of significance [14, 15, 32, p195, 16, p324].
Whilst there has been „a long literary tradition of studying the art of narrative‟ [27, p3],
the application and analysis of narratives in human and social sciences is also extensive
[2, 3, 29, 37, 47, 57], although not without critical debate [54]. Narrative analysis has
been undertaken on a variety of topics: ill health, with its impact on individual identity
[42, 40, 20]; sexuality in modern society [53] and management [13, 24, 25; 28]. Whilst
there has been some narrative analyses in the area of information systems development
(see Brown [14] on IT implementation; Brown et al. [13] on games software project
team work and Wagner and Newell [64] on ERP implementation for example), little, if
any, has been undertaken on HRIS work or, indeed, talent management initiatives of IS
specialists.
1.2 Conceptual distinctions of narrative
We follow Polkinghorne‟s suggestion that '”Narrative'” in the singular is used to refer to
the general narrative process or form, whereas “Narratives” as a plural refers to the
diverse individual stories, which differ in content and plot line‟ [52, p188]. With regard
to narrative, various conceptual distinctions have been made between different types of
narrative for the analytical task. Elliott advises there are three key features of narratives:
chronological (as temporal representations of sequences of events); meaningfulness and
that they are inherently social, in that they are produced for a specific audience [27, p4].
1.2.1 Narrative orders
Carr [19] provides two „orders‟ of narrative. First order narratives relate to the „stories
that individuals tell about themselves and their own experiences…The special
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significance of these ... is that they can be understood as in some senses constitutive of
individual identities [hence „ontological‟] [19, p12]. Second-order narratives are not
necessarily individually-based but, rather, are those accounts we as researchers
construct in order to present our interpretation of social, cultural and historical
knowledge. Elliott gives Abbott‟s [4] account of the formation of a profession as an
example of a second-order narrative [27, p12]. Somers and Gibson [58 in 27, p12]
prefer alternative terms „ontological narratives‟ and „representational narratives‟. For
our study we coined the terms personal narratives which reflects Carr‟s first order
narrative definition and contextual narratives to denote the existing conditions of the
milieu or social, cultural and historical environment in which the actors telling the
narratives enact their practices.
1.2.2 Contextual narratives of talent management
With regard to contextual narratives, we begin our methodological story by focusing on
our research on talent management. The term „talent management‟ became common
parlance at the end of the 1990s when used by McKinsey consultants in their report,
„The War for Talent‟ [8]. The profile of talent management was raised as organisations
responded to increasing competition for those high performers with high potential
across sectors at all levels, including graduates, individuals with a particular aptitude for
leadership or the next CEO. As „talent‟ came to be perceived as the primary source of
competitive differentiation, organisations started to think about the steps they needed to
take to ensure they identified, developed and retained the „brightest and the best‟
people. Talent management practice was initially linked to recruitment then changed to
encompass all HR activities but is still rather focused upon high performing individuals
with senior leadership potential.
In 2007, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) provided a
definition of talent as „those individuals who can make a difference to organisational
performance, either through their immediate contribution or in the longer term by
demonstrating the highest levels of potential‟ [21, pxi]. Similarly, their research into the
processes of talent management also identified a wide range of practices that tended to
be organisation-specific and dependent upon the context within which talent
management was taking place. But once more a definition was derived from various
examples of successful practice in this and other research projects as: „The systematic
attraction, identification, development, engagement/retention and deployment of those
individuals with high potential who are of particular value to an organisation‟ [21 pxi].
In our study we examined nine organisations representing a wide range of sectors which
included manufacturing, finance, hospitality, e-business, the NHS and local government
to highlight different issues and challenges for talent management. Our aim was to
obtain contextual narratives of a broad range of stakeholders to understand how they
defined talent and what they were doing in managing and nurturing this talent. Over 100
face-to-face interviews were undertaken with senior executives, HR directors, HR
professionals, talent management specialists, line managers and individual employees.
Our research protocol was constructed from a literature review and a focus group
discussion with 10 leading „expert‟ practitioner HR directors. Interviews in
organisations were supplemented with employee focus groups. At this stage we
interviewed specialists from the finance and other functional groups such as sales and
marketing, although they were targeted as leadership material rather than „pure‟
functional specialists. Strangely, we were given no access to specialists from the IS
discipline at any level of the case study organisations.
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1.2.3 Methods for identifying/constructing contextual narratives
Data was transcribed, loaded into an NVIVO database [56] and analysed to identify
narratives about organisational talent management initiatives. We used a grounded
theory approach [36] to assign initial concepts and theme codes about talent
management generally to all the research data. We analysed the three types of coding
during the analysis. For example, „open coding‟ was used to examine the data and
assign codes by giving conceptual labels to the phenomena as they were discovered
(e.g. „organisational talent‟). We compared the concepts being examined with those that
had already been devised from the initial expert focus groups and coded whilst keeping
an open mind during this process to avoid the concepts inherent in the data being
obscured by any predetermined theoretical basis (such as those found in the domain of
human resource management (HRM)).
We then provisionally combined the concepts into related categories to reduce the
number of concepts to be handled (such as „talent‟) and provide a stronger conceptual
basis to the themes discovered. Next, „axial coding‟ commenced where we examined
each category in terms of: the conditions that cause it, the context in which it occurs,
actions and interactional strategies by which it is managed or handled and the
consequences which arise from the category. By examining these factors, it becomes
possible to link categories and to verify the linkages by testing them against the data.
This enables the researcher to ground their theory on the data. The final result of axial
coding is a very rich description of the phenomenon being researched. From this we
began to produce case study reports of contextual narratives for each organisation for
collation in the final research document. As the research was geared to practical
recommendations rather than actual theory we did not undertake the final stage of
„selective‟ coding, which enables the development of a grounded theory by integrating
the categorized material into a theory which accounts for the phenomenon being
researched. (This integration is done by selecting one of the categories as the focus of
interest and making it the „core category‟ or „story line‟ around which the rest of the
categories are organized. This creates a theoretical framework, which is validated
against the data).
1.3 Displaying the findings: Template analysis
In order to make sense of the rich data from the case study research we chose template
analysis to display emerging themes. The term "template analysis" refers to a particular
way of thematically analysing qualitative data [see 69]. The data invariably comes from
interview transcripts, but may be any kind of textual data, including diary entries, text
from electronic "interviews" (e-mail), or open-ended question responses on a written
questionnaire. Template analysis involves the development of a coding "template"; that
is to say, broad themes (e.g. "Employer branding") encompass successively narrower,
more specific ones (e.g. "employer value propositions"). Such a template has three
levels but here we present an example of the coding template which summarises themes
identified by the researcher(s) as representing the talent management themes overall and
some of the practices. We can see that with template analysis hierarchical coding is
emphasised. In column one are the a priori codes we constructed from the original
talent management research material. In column two are the specific themes we found
relating to the talent management processes in the case study organisations. This helped
to provide a structure to focus the next steps of the HRIS study. The template analysis in
table 1, below, shows some of the categories:
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Key theme Practices
1.Constructing 1. Defining „talent‟ as those with leadership potential only
talent categories 2. Exclusive labels for talent (e.g., „high performers‟; „rising
stars‟; ‟emerging talent‟; „entry level talent‟).
2. Acquiring talent 1. Ascertaining talent supply and demand inside and outside of
the organization
2. Talent review panels identify talent for succession planning of
two or more levels of promotion
3. Employer branding
4. Succession planning
5. Recruitment strategies, policies and practices
6. Selection strategies, policies and practices
3. Developing talent 1. Leadership development only
2. Regular „talent reviews‟ of individual development needs,
plans and objectives in key workforce groups linked to a coherent
succession planning process.
3. Coaching, mentoring, job rotations and international transfers
frequently used as career development tools in preference to
investment in formal post graduate educational programmes.
4. Managing talent 1. Active inclusion of succession planning and leadership
development in the talent management strategy
2. Developing clear policies and resource planning for
identification, nomination, selection, engagement and retention of
internal and external talent
3. Employer branding has a strong and positive image in the
marketplace
4. Review panels to identify talent across the organisation
5. Performance management processes designed to provide
robust evidence about individual‟s high performance
6. Provision of regular feedback on performance
7. Line managers involved in all areas including coaching,
mentoring and trained in giving performance assessments
Table 1: Template analysis: two out of three levels of talent management themes
1.3.1 Talent management and the IS specialist
A key finding which had not been part of the original study protocol was that in over
80% of the interviews with line managers and HR respondents there was a concern that
their talent management processes did not facilitate the inclusion of specialists who
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were not suitable or did not want to pursue management roles. This prompted the
researchers to embark on a new study with a different organisation to those in the
original study in order to explore the extent to which those working specifically in the
IS domain were taken into account in talent management programmes.
We had been undertaking ethnographic research with „Flow plc.‟, for over a decade in
project teams developing global HRIS. Flow plc. is a leading power-systems company
manufacturing in 20 countries, employing approximately 38,000 people worldwide and
serving customers in 150 countries. The HRIS project leader offered to provide further
funding for a study to consider talent management issues related to his project team
members, who were involved in developing global HR information systems. Gathering
new research material from this organisation would enable us to collect another, more
specific, data set, apply it to the initial template and modify it in the light of careful
consideration of each transcript. Once a final version was defined, and all transcripts
coded to it, the fully completed template would then serve as the basis for our
interpretations and illuminations of the data set and we could then write up the findings.
However, we had a way to go yet.
2 Ethnographic work and the challenges of interpreting fieldwork in
the HRIS culture
Van Maanen [63, p1] described ethnography as the coming together of fieldwork and
culture, resulting in a written representation of that culture. He describes cultures as
comprising the knowledge that members ('natives‟) of a given group are thought to
more or less share. This knowledge subsequently informs, embeds, shapes and accounts
for the routine and not-so-routine activities of the members of that culture [22, 11, 60].
Ethnography has long been a recognised research method for studying information
systems work on topics ranging from ethnography in systems design [38] to critical
ethnography studies on IS developments as an inherently political activity [9]. In
particular, using an ethnographic approach to study project teams as they develop and
implement their systems can enable enhanced understanding about local project routines
and the complex problems that practitioners face during their daily work routines and
help account for how practitioners address these problems.
2.1 A contextual narrative about Human Resource Information Systems
Over the years, to orient our research with our sponsor, Flow plc., we had constructed a
contextual narrative about the development of HR information systems (HRIS). HRIS
are increasingly being used to ensure human capital data is utilised in a strategic way to
both collect relevant data and enable the sharing of common data across the enterprise
in a real-time environment [12]. However, these can involve major technical and
organisational challenges, for example, from business process reorganisation, and this
often involves delays and budget over-runs and result in major organisational challenges
[59]. One possible reason for this is that talent management for those working on
international project teams is not in place, with a number of gaps being identified [68].
Firstly, the „hybrid‟ knowledge and skills requirement of functional HRIS teams,
typically composed of both IT personnel and representatives from the departments
where the system is going to be used, are generally not acknowledged and understood.
Secondly, there is often a lack of understanding of the key roles required on the project
and lack of appreciation of the relational knowledge and skills required of HRIS
specialists in order that the system provided meets their clients‟ needs [61, 30]. Thirdly,
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there is little aligned appreciation of a „supply chain‟ model to the attraction,
development, engagement, mobility and reward of team talent.
In order for HRIS to be used effectively both now and in the future, it is clear that those
designing, implementing and operating those systems need to be recognised as core
staff fulfilling business/operation-critical roles who have specific talents which can
enable systems for the provision of effective strategic HRM. The strategic importance
of these „niche‟ roles is not recognised either by HR management or within
organisational talent management systems. We suggest that the reason for this is that the
elements and importance of these roles are not understood and we had two key
questions to explore in the next stage of our research:
1. How is the „talent‟ of specialists in the HR IS domain defined in practice in
comparison to generalised talent management initiatives?
2. How is HRIS talent nurtured and their careers developed?
3 Conducting the ethnography
In Flow plc., focusing upon specialist talent, we conducted 25 interviews with
stakeholders from their HR and IT functions in the UK, Germany, Canada and the USA,
each lasting up to two hours and tape-recorded. Ten interviews were with members of
the HRIS team at the corporate headquarters and their HR and finance „clients‟, the
other interviews were undertaken by telephone. Those not interviewed included the IT
supplier‟s consultants, country business managers and employees who were not part of
the global HRIS programme. Extensive notes were also taken of informal discussions
and telephone calls with various members of the HRIS team. All interviews were
undertaken using a narrative interviewing convention with a chronological underlying
form. In this study the use of narrative in examining lived experience as it happened
provided a unique opportunity to see how 'continuity and change are emplotted in
narrative form…where “a good-enough” narrative contains the past in terms of the
present and points to a future that cannot be predicted, although it contains the elements
out of which the future will created‟ [39, p35].
However, given the „alternative‟ interpretive nature of this study, we had to take care
that appropriate methods of evaluating the research are undertaken. Here we use
Bryman and Bell‟s [17] criteria for evaluating qualitative research as a checklist for
undertaking „alternative‟ interpretive research in IS:
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Criteria Evidence from the HRIS study
Authenticity Frequency of ethnographic researchers on Flow plc‟s company
premises meant that narrative findings were fed back to the
project team on a regular basis. This raised awareness of relevant
issues amongst the HRIS team, enabled reflection on their practice
as a result of reading their own narratives and encouraged changes
to the perception of the researchers on the situations occurring.
This provides for authenticity in the narratives produced from the
study.
Trustworthiness When respondents from the HRIS team were asked to read their
Credibility own narratives in the interview transcript, we requested they
highlight any issues they felt they missed or did not report
correctly in their account. If necessary, amendments were then
made to the transcripts. Informal meetings were also held to ask
team members for feedback on observations the ethnographers
had made about the project team and talent management.
Trustworthiness Rich descriptions were achieved by asking each respondent,
Transferability where relevant, to use real-life examples and to describe their
experiences of this in detail. Probing questions were asked.
Narrative construction was undertaken by supplementing
individual descriptions with observations made by the
ethnographers, meeting discussion notes, notes from informal
discussions and telephone calls with the HRIS team.
Trustworthiness The ethnographer always has to be vigilant that she is not
Dependability sacrificing „truth‟ for dramatic effect (Denzin, 1997, p142).
Electronic and written records were made throughout the research
process and shared between the research team, with academic
colleagues auditing the process. The records detailed how
decisions were made e.g in relation to the respondent sample,
interview questions and what to observe.
Trustworthiness A research protocol was used to ensure consistency across the
Confirmability interviews. Respondents were asked to comment on their
transcripts and observations the research team had made and any
amendments made. The ethnographic nature of the study also
meant that the ethnographers were aware of any internal politics
which may have influenced the researchers‟ objectivity.
Table 2: Alternative criteria for evaluating qualitative interpretive research (Bryman and Bell,
2003)
It has been proposed that the validity and reliability of qualitative, interpretive research
can be evaluated based on two key criteria: trustworthiness and authenticity [44, 45,
17]. Authenticity refers to the wider impact the research might have and in this sense
shares similarities with action research [9]. Trustworthiness consists of four elements.
Bryman and Bell [17] describe the first element „credibility‟ as being concerned with
the feasibility of the account and the extent to which the researchers have consulted the
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respondents to check that they have understood their accounts correctly (respondent
validation). The second element refers to „transferability‟ and the degree to which the
rich descriptions provided by the respondents could be applied to other settings.
„Dependability‟ is the third element. This considers how the research has been
conducted and whether records of the different stages have been kept (such as interview
transcripts, field notes and data analysis decisions). It also relates to the extent to which
this process is audited by peers. According to Bryman and Bell [17] the final element
„confirmability‟ considers whether the researchers have remained objective throughout
the research process.
4 Analysing narratives from ethnography
Ethnographic narratives are highly reflexive in content and in construction. They
involve self reflection and critical interpretation, with the researcher interpreting the
interpretations of others. In this part of our methodological story we foreground Elliott‟s
highlighting of three key features of narratives: chronological (as temporal
representations of sequences of events); meaningfulness and that they are inherently
social, in that they are produced for a specific audience [24, p4].
4.1 Chronology, meaningfulness and social specificity of personal narratives
from Flow plc. HRIS
Throughout this ethnography the chronological aspect of narrative was engaged by
asking questions such as „Tell me about your experiences of the project from the day
you became involved‟ and critical incident questions such as „Tell me what has
happened since we last talked‟ [10]. To identify meaningfulness for the individual, these
questions were linked to probing questions, particularly about each interviewee‟s
feelings about chosen critical incidents along the course of the project. For social
specificity we gathered personal narratives embedded in contextual narratives reported
in documentary materials such as house magazines, internal memorandum on company
activities generally and global information systems developments specifically.
Contextual narrative analysis was still being undertaken during this. All tape transcripts,
a number of contact and document summary sheets [46] and research journal notes were
input into a qualitative software analysis database (NVIVO8), where they were coded
for narrative themes to add to the template analysis at levels one, two and three. Next,
emerging narratives across ontological groups over the history of the project were
identified and then analyzed to identify key themes in relation to talent management
issues perceived by individuals to be important, including concerns about career
development.
In the next section we provide a contextual narrative analysis of HRIS within the
organisation and then an example of a personal narrative analysis from one of the
participants on the project. In constructing each personal narrative we drew upon Labov
and Waletzky‟s [43] temporal framework with its six separate elements for analysing
individual or personal narratives in order to provide a clearer frame for the analysis of
first order narratives of the HRIS team members in our study:
A: the abstract (a summary of the subject of the narrative);
O: the orientation (time, place, situation, participants);
Ca: the complicating action (what actually happened);
E: the evaluation (the meaning and significance of the action);
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R: the resolution (what finally happened); and lastly
C: the coda, which returns the perspective to the present
4.2 Contextual narrative of Flow plc’s talent management
With regard to talent management generally in Flow plc., management and leadership
development teams had constructed a contextual narrative about managing talent. In the
first instance they were implementing rigorously designed talent management
strategies. Whereas talent management had previously consisted of separate HR
activities to engage and nurture talent , their strategy was now about using all three
recruitment, performance management or leadership development to get the best
results. The narrative continued that the growth of talent management from all of these
initiatives is also driven through solid executive board support and an awareness of
how closely talent management initiatives need to be linked to the goals of the
organisation. However, one jarring aspect of this contextual narrative is that talent is
only taken to be those who have potential to progress to senior executive level, with
specialists such as scientific, engineering, IS or HR specialists not considered for talent
pools.
4.2.1 HRIS implementation in Flow plc.
Flow plc. found itself in the invidious position of operating many legacy systems across
functions, with 1600 for HR alone. It was decided to implement an enterprise resource
planning system which would reduce wasteful repetition and align data management
across functions. The HR component of the system had a number of different elements:
personnel administration; organisation management; reward; time management; payroll;
resourcing; travel and expenses; training and events management; global mobility;
occupational health and reporting and personal development. Stakeholders involved in
the project included: business managers, HR clients as system users, IS project
managers, IS designers, HR IS developers and maintainers and several external to the
organisation, such as consultants.
Flow plc. experienced a number of challenges in competitive international and local
labour markets in attracting and identifying talent with key skills or with high
professional, technical and/or leadership potential. Their recruitment processes
encompassed external candidates and internal recruitment through intra-, inter- and
cross-functional moves, secondments and rotations. Many see talent management
programmes as capitalising on internal talent. And so it was the case here that it was
decided that HRIS team recruitment would be from within Flow plc. and the project
team leader used his network to identify „suitable people‟ so there were names against
various jobs.
The Flow plc HRIS development team responding to client needs had grown
organically over the last 10 years, rather than being designed and developed
strategically. This growth had been driven both by embracing and expanding SAP HR
technology and functionality in the UK and the addition of different parts of the
business operating in different countries (USA, Canada and Germany). This meant there
were eight members on the UK central HR IS team and six in HRIS teams in other
geographies. Among the recruits was Phil.
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4.3 Personal narrative analysis: A Flow plc HRIS project team member
Phil had been with the company in roles other that HRIS for 37 years, such as working
with the organisation‟s financial systems, in HR, as a systems analyst and being
responsible for the finance component of ERP. Although there were formal company
recruitment practices, staff on IS projects tended to be recruited by word-of-mouth. And
so it was that Phil was informally recruited to his present role to act as a trouble-shooter
for the HRIS team since the team were experiencing problems integrating data from the
German business unit. Here is an extract from his personal narrative which explores his
recruitment to the HRIS project team, analysed according to Labov and Waletzky‟s [43]
temporal framework.
Element Evidence
A When my last ERP project finished in 2003 I started to look to the future.
O My boss said basically, you are on maintenance; we‟ve got nothing on the
horizon in finance. And they knew I liked challenges. So in the
development reviews we discussed it. And I knew they were having
problems with integration issues in Germany. John [HRIS project team
manager], who I‟d known from when he first came in the company, I was
talking to him about it.
Ca And then John rang me and asked me if I wanted a job with him. There
aren‟t many people like me who come from finance to HR and vice versa.
Apparently he was told through the development review process that I was
looking for project work. He just said I guess I‟m just going to give you a
lot of rubbish to do really, all the difficult things, and I said that‟s fine with
me. It was all to do with audits and a whole host of jobs including the
trouble with the Germans and integrating their financial operating costs.
He wanted me to be the Germany account manager, if you like.
E It would be a feather in my cap so that‟s exactly why I went. I calmed the
team down, and any time they had a problem I could deal with that straight
away. John was a bit fearful but I‟m the only one who understands how it
all fits together. I spent a good few years in HR and finance.
R And sure enough, John stopped getting the aggro from the team.
C But we‟ll just have to see how it goes now though because I‟m getting on a
bit, and I‟m only good for a few more years. I‟m 59 in January. I‟m
looking perhaps at another 3 years, but that‟s it.
Key: A = abstract; O = orientation; Ca = Complicating action; E = evaluation; R
= resolution; C = coda
Table 3: Personal narrative analysis
We see here how Phil‟s narrative is chronological, in that it takes us across the time
scale of the recruitment process and beyond. Distinctive to Phil‟s personal narrative was
his meaningful way of presenting his joining the project as a tale of his rescuing a
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difficult situation through his personal attributes and his extensive knowledge and
experience. Finally, although there were company policies for formalised recruitment
practices, we found time and again that Phil‟s story of being recruited through a process
of serendipity was a common one and he would have spoken to the condition of many
others in IS teams as his narrative had social meaning.
Collating the various narratives of the interviewees on the project we were able to add
to the elements at third level of the template analysis (we show only two rows as an
example):
Key theme Practices IS talent
1. Constructing Defining „talent‟ as those with No shared organisational
talent categories leadership potential only definition of, or special
„labels‟ for „specialist‟
Exclusive labels for talent (e.g., „high
(non-managerial) talent
performers‟; „rising stars‟; ‟emerging
talent‟; „entry level talent‟). No recognition that talent
exists at team level as well
as individual level
2. Acquiring 1. Ascertaining talent supply and 1. & 2. Reactive human
talent demand inside and outside of the resource planning for
organization specialist talent
2. Talent review panels identify talent 2. No clear perspective
for succession planning of two or more available across the
levels of promotion organisation.
3. Employer branding 3. Employer brand shows
no IS staff „employment
4. Succession planning
promises‟
5. Recruitment strategies, policies and
4. No formal succession
practices
planning for HRIS jobs
6. Selection strategies, policies and
practices
Table 4: Level three completion of template analysis
5 Discussion
Researchers adopt narrative analysis for a number of reasons: an interest in people‟s
lived experiences and an appreciation of the temporal nature of that experience; a desire
to empower research participants and allow them to contribute to determining what are
the most salient themes in an area of research; an interest in process and change over
time; an interest in the self and representations of the self and an awareness that the
researcher him- or herself is also a narrator [24, p6]. Personal narratives are important
because 'a person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor ... in the reactions of
others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's
biography...must continually integrate events which occur in the external world and sort
them into the ongoing 'story' about the self' [35, p54].
83
Narratives (understandings, meanings and stories) of organisational practice, then, are
constructed and negotiated by researchers and the subjects of their studies through
dialogic and reflexive processes relating practice, context, language, discourse and
interaction. These narratives are: ongoing and open-ended; mediated through processes
of interpretation, reflection and theorising and occurring in a dialogue with self and
between self and others. In telling the ongoing story about self, individuals are
interpreting and reflecting upon their „real life‟ experiences as they engage with
different forms of empirical material and draw upon concepts and theories in order to
bring about new and critical understandings of organisational work .
5.1 Interpretation of narratives
Taking an interpretive ethnographic stance as we have shown here produces distinctive
and problematic challenges for those trying to understand the „lived experience of
others‟ and raises concerns for the subjects, the producers and the consumers of
ethnography [63]. Denzin [26] describes a triple crisis of representation, legitimation
and praxis, with legitimation a key element requiring some rethinking in relation to the
terms validity, generalizability and reliability (with „truth‟ and verisimilitude
problematic concepts here).
With regard to making truth claims, we take the position of pragmatists in our analytical
presentation of contextual and personal narratives. Watson [67] helps us delineate three
ways of understanding theories of truth. A correspondence theory of truth involves
judging an item of knowledge in terms of how accurately it paints a picture or gives a
report of what actually happened. A coherence/plausibility theory of truth involves an
item of knowledge being judged in terms of how well it „fits in with‟ everything else we
have learned about this matter previously. A pragmatist theory of truth involves judging
knowledge in terms of how effectively one would fulfil whatever projects one was
pursuing in the area of activity covered by the knowledge, if we based our actions on
the understanding of those activities which it offers.
By taking a pragmatist approach to the utilisation of contextual narrative analysis of the
literature, we were able to develop a typology of talent management narratives to map
against the first level narratives of HRIS specialist talent management on this project.
By using template analysis for the context narratives from case studies of talent
management generally and Labov and Waletzky‟s [43] framework to analyse a personal
narrative from an ethnography of an HRIS project from HRIS specialists in particular,
we have attempted to show how an examination may be undertaken of the critical
incidents related to management of their talents.
6 Conclusions
Previous research on talent management has argued that a clear position needs to be
taken on how the talents of all employees might be optimised, not just those who are
chosen for the „future leadership‟ talent pool [21, p5]. In the methodological story in
this paper we reflexively considered our utilisation of narrative methods of research
collection and analysis in two research projects on talent management undertaken
between 2007 and 2009. The first consisted of case study research with nine
organisations undertaking talent management. By using „template analysis‟ [69] to
identify a typology of narratives in the talent management context, we identified how
systems designed in this way tended to focus only on those who were regarded as
having leadership potential and neglected specialist talent.
84
We then took these findings to another research project we were involved in, an
ethnography which was focused on the talent management of project teams working on
a global, enterprise-wide IS designed for use by HR and management. Here we used
analytical tools of contextual and personal narratives to demonstrate how findings can
emerge from interpretive research material.
The investigation highlighted the contextual challenges of attracting and nurturing
specialist talent for global project teams working on an enterprise-wide system
operating beyond the usual functional HR department boundaries targeted at enabling
significant innovation of HR business processes in the networked organisation. In order
to test out our emerging propositions about specialist talent highlighted in the talent
management template analysis, we used Lavor and Waletzky‟s [43] hierarchical
framework to analyse personal narratives derived from that ethnography. This
illuminated how such an individual, through his narrative, discursively made sense of
his career transition as it emerged over time and in different geographical spaces
Through such insights, the narrative analyst can construct a rich, complex, multifaceted
and aligned picture from the voices of situated individuals. As Giddens [35] would have
it, in the post-traditional order of modernity, against the backdrop of new forms of
mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. The
'reflexive project of the self which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet
continuously revised, biographical narrative, takes place in the context of multiple
choice as filtered through abstract systems' [35, p5]. Highlighting the serendipitous
nature of interpretive and ethnographic research shows that such „alternative‟ methods
of analysis have great value for the organisational analyst examining the IS domain.
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