No theory, experience! : Talent Management in the Chinese Educational Sector

Talent management (TM) has been researched and practiced by many researchers and practitioners for years. The theory itself is based on empirical findings. However, there is no clear and solid definition for it despite thousands of articles and books were published in the past century. Among them, there are not many related to TM in Chinese context, not to mention TM in the Chinese educational sector which we are quite interested in. The lack of literature and research in this specific field evoked curiosity from us. Therefore, a case study was conducted in Chinese middle schools with a focus on talented teacher management where those teachers are considered the talent which need to be managed. This study is based on qualitative approach with empirical data collected from four in-depth interviews. After analyzing the data, we got unexpected results. As a matter of fact, the schools have no knowledge about TM even though what they did to the teachers reflect some aspects of TM, or in other words, they are not aware of what they did is in fact part of TM. This empirical finding reflects how TM is found, developed and labeled. In the end, we concluded that TM is an area of fascination and inspiration. It comes from the practice without which it will not exist and develop, which is embodied in our case study. In this study, school leaders are not aware that they were in fact using some methods of TM. They just do not know how to label those methods