Developing Taxonomy of Talent Misuse of Entrepreneurial Ventures

Event Center A & B

By compiling cases of talent exploitation of entrepreneurial ventures, this study aims to build theoretical foundation for an ethical assessment of practices to safeguard the hiring practice of young companies. We tackled this issue by presenting a comprehensive taxonomy of talent abusing among entrepreneurial ventures, by focusing on young talent. The term “intern exploitation” falls short of providing a comprehensive notion of the reality that many companies exploit not only interns but also young recruits. Further, some companies disguise their employees as interns to achieve or maintain some legal status aiming to obtain associated benefits. So it gets more difficult to separate interns from regular employees, which further makes it irrelevant if one only focuses on interns. With the given fuzzy reality, we try to develop a conceptual framework that is comprehensive enough to capture more potential victims in similar situations. This project involves multiple tasks of field research using diverse sources, including practitioners, civic organizations for labor issues, labor lawyers, labor unions, and/or government organizations. We reviewed existing cases to develop a rough consensus of the subject matter, based on the cases collected both from U.S. and South Korea. After a review of the cases, we develop a taxonomy of talent misuse, by sorting cases according to their salient characteristics. The goal is to provide a fundamental ontology of entrepreneurial talent misuse. The contribution here to the academic community is this taxonomy, as it will serve as a basis of conceptual framework of the subject matter.