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This article provides a comprehensive, critical examination of talent management (TM) literature through a narrative review spanning the past two decades. It explores the evolving TM landscape, offering a holistic view of its development and insights on global TM, global mobility and related theories. The goal is to enhance understanding of TM’s evolution and recommend future research directions grounded in contemporary theoretical frameworks.

A rigorous screening process produced a sample of 95 peer-reviewed articles (2004–2024) from Q1 and Q2 journals, selected for their theoretical and empirical contributions. Strict inclusion criteria ensured relevance, focusing on academic discourse. A thematic analysis traced key themes and TM’s evolution.

The synthesis identified six historical contexts and three narrative questions, addressing the standardization versus contextualization debate to frame TM’s evolution. Findings reveal a progression from early concepts to a mature, theory-driven field. Three research perspectives are proposed to guide TM toward balanced, contemporary approaches. Global mobility highlights the need for context-specific strategies, while integrating global and critical perspectives underscores contextualizing TM practices to diverse organizational and national contexts. This ensures inclusivity, equity and actionable insights for practitioners.

This narrative review provides a fresh perspective by tracing TM’s evolution through a historical lens, revealing trends and dynamics often missed in systematic reviews. It integrates the standardization vs. contextualization debate with dynamic capabilities and institutional theory, positioning TM as an agile, context-specific process adaptable in rapidly changing global environments.

Talent management (TM) is a crucial strategic issue for global organizations, extending beyond multinationals and big companies to encompass small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon sphere. However, TM in SMEs is still under-researched, with a lack of studies and evidence on TM determinants and TM in practice. This study explores, using the lens of institutional theory, how talent philosophies and a combination of institutional factors shape TM in French SMEs, highlighting the interplay between these elements within the specific context of French SMEs.

Given the limited knowledge about TM determinants in SMEs and the need to uncover and understand the phenomenon investigated, this study is exploratory in nature and lends itself to a qualitative research approach. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 27 CEOs, managers, TM and HR managers across 15 SMEs in France provided a comprehensive cross-industry perspective.

The study reveals that talent philosophies in French SMEs are predominantly inclusive and development-oriented, influenced by institutional factors such as the cultural logic of proximity and personalization, state support mechanisms like the Fonds Unique Interministériel (FUI) and legal frameworks that emphasize equal opportunity. Organizational elements like size and proximity foster a community-focused, egalitarian TM approach, while ownership and vulnerability lead to a reactive and informal TM strategy. The study presents a model that links these determinants to the specific TM approaches observed in French SMEs, illustrating how institutional factors like centralized control and egalitarianism shape TM practices.

This paper highlights the need for more empirical studies on talent philosophies, institutional and organizational factors not only in SMEs but also in comparison with multinational enterprises (MNEs), through institutional theory. Particular attention should be paid to the homogenization of SME sizes based on their level of establishment.

This study extends studies on TM determinants in SMEs, from the perspective of talent philosophies, utilizing insights from French institutional theory. It is also among the few and new studies to highlight contextual issues of TM as well as how TM is practiced depending on internal and external factors.

This research seeks to unveil an integrative perspective on talent management (TM) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly through a multilevel approach and within the French context. Drawing on dynamic capability theory and focusing on French SMEs as a rich domain for multilevel studies, the research aims to elucidate how these enterprises operationalize TM while addressing and integrating their distinct capabilities and requirements, internal dynamics and challenges.

Through an integrative study based on a qualitative approach, we collect data from 15 French SMEs. In total, 20 semi-structured interviews with individuals from different levels, managing and working in SMEs, were conducted and analyzed thematically to identify patterns across all SMEs. Companies and interviewees represented a variety of sectors such as telecommunication, high-tech, circular economy, etc.

We present an integrative multilevel approach through TM in French SMEs, describing how SMEs operationalize TM. Across three main levels (organizational, collective and individual) and key SMEs’ capabilities, our results underscore the significance of top management commitment capabilities and SMEs' assessment capabilities, the involvement of line managers in facilitating strategic agility and cultivating the talent ecosystem and the outcomes of TM in driving SMEs' reconfiguration, extending beyond mere TM-level integrations and articulations. We address these findings for foreign SMEs intending to enter the French context and SMEs’ actors on the importance of contextual issues and level articulations while calling for future research focusing on group-level and managers’ roles in TM.

This article moves the TM research towards an integrative multilevel view in SMEs as a fertile ground for studying multilevel TM. As part of recent studies on TM in French SMEs within the broader European competitive context, it expands the integrative approach in SMEs by accommodating the unique requirements, the multilevel dynamics and the challenges that they encounter with TM, especially when compared to multinational enterprises (MNEs).