Identifying and Valorizing Human Resources Within Territories

Territory is the subject of multiple disciplinary approaches (Simone et al. 2018; Paasi et al. 2020) and, in parallel, the territorial dimension of management situations (Raulet-Croset 2021) has been studied in a growing number of research works over the past 20 years. For Simone et al. (2018), the territory is "a complex system located in a specific geographical space that emerges from the co-evolution of a bundle of heterogeneous processes (anthropological-cultural, relational, cognitive and economic productive) that characterizes that space in a unique and unrepeatable way"1. While some territories focus on exploiting their natural resources, others develop expertise, regional know-how or an innovation ecosystem (Kritz et al. 2018), offering a territorial competitive advantage, thanks to a skilled workforce and the social capital it produces (Stoop et al. 2021). In order to identify and valorize the skills of organizations and inhabitants, the issue of prioritizing Human Resources (HR) lies at the heart of the territory's concerns (Evon 2018; Loubès et al. 2021). Over the last 15 years or so, these projects have been deployed under various names: "territorial HRM" (T-HRM)2, "Territorialization of HRM"3, "HR-focused territory projects"4, "Territorial Strategic Workforce Planning" (TSWP)5 or "Territorial Management of Jobs and Skills"6 (Loubès et al. 2021). The term "T-HRM" will be retained in this chapter. Behind the multiplicity of contexts, these projects aim to collectively resolve employment and/or skills management and HRM issues at the territorial level, by fostering close links between public and private actors, through collective and structured actions (Geddes 2008; Purkarthofer et al. 2021). Some projects have been successful, while others have encountered great difficulties (Couteret et al. 2019; Mazzilli 2021). Several groups of actors are usually involved in identifying and developing human resources and skills. Territorial authorities, businesses and the voluntary sector are all brought in to coordinate their actions, sometimes from a new angle, with the aim of creating new or evolving intervention tools. Citizens can be mobilized as beneficiaries or future entrepreneurs (Geddes 2008). Implementing a T-HRM project therefore requires a great deal of collaborative work with local actors, in order to identify the issues and needs of all concerned, and to propose actions to meet them. This dynamic can also lead to changes in the norms and rules that prevail between actors. The analysis of this institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006) investigates the black box that reveals the dynamics of projects aimed at identifying and valorizing human resources and skills within a territory. The aspect examined in this chapter, which is inherent to territorial HRM, is that of developing new collaborative practices that respond to a need to identify and valorize a territory's human resources. In order to better understand this process, we propose an analytical framework showing the key antecedents that determine the success, or not, of a T-HRM project. The chapter first proposes an analytical framework based on three key dimensions of T-HRM, supplemented by an analysis based on institutional work (Cloutier et al. 2016). Two case studies on T-HRM projects will then be presented to illustrate concretely how our analytical framework can be mobilized (section 8.3). Finally, the lessons learned from these case studies will be put into perspective, highlighting benefits for both the researcher and the practitioner.