Global Talent seeks to examine the utility of skilled foreigners beyond their
human capital value by focusing on their social capital potential, especially
their role as transnational bridges between host and home countries. Gi-Wook
Shin and Joon Nak Choi build on an emerging stream of research that
conceptualizes global labor mobility as a positive-sum game in which countries
and businesses benefit from building ties across geographic space, rather than
the zero-sum game implied by the "global war for talent" and "brain drain"
metaphors.
The book empirically demonstrates its thesis by examination of the case of
Korea: a state archetypical of those that have been embracing economic
globalization while facing