The war for_talent The gatekeeper role by James R Faulconbridge
Recent years have been characterised by the increasing encroachment
into policy and academic debates of discourses describing knowledge
(Leadbeater, 1999) and weightless economies (Quah, 2001). A cornerstone of such discourses is the importance of flexible, talented labour as a central factor of production that maintains the competitiveness of firms and places in the digital age of contemporary globalization (DTI, 1998; Florida, 2002; UNCTAD, 2004). This has been discussed in relation to economic activities from Formula I racing (Henry and Pinch, 1999) to financial services (The Corporation of London, 2003) and high-technology (Saxenian, 2006).
Meanwhile, Thrift (1997) has argued that firm behaviour is increasingly defined by a ‘cultural circuit of capitalism’. This is a “circuit which is now self-organising, is responsible for the production and distribution of managerial knowledge to managers. As it has grown, so have its appetites. It now has a constant and voracious need for new
knowledge” (Thrift, 1997, 34). The ‘knowledge worker’ is one of the central components of the discourses Thrift describes.
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