ABSTRACT
Competence is socially constructed by people in a work context according to the colleagues engaged with them. While the notion of talent has been discussed both conceptually and empirically, our contribution is to highlight how the richer scientific literature on competence may reveal blind spots and open up new perspectives to that of talent. Talent management was elaborated upon the assumption of high transferability of a selected few talents from one work context to another. In addition to ignoring differences among individuals’ strategies, the early talent management literature ignored the role of individual perceptions. Inclusive approaches of talent management are uncommon since they were developed in settings like small organizations, public organizations, or cultural environments that favor the approach such as Germany or Sweden. Where talent appears predominantly as a context-free notion and an object to be managed, competence is an attribute of the worker, an attribute that appears context-free or context-bound, depending on the scientific discipline.
