The Globalization of Executive Search

Book excerpt: Executive search, headhunting, is now one of the archetypal new knowledge intensive professional services, as well as a labor market intermediary bound up with globalization. In this book, the authors examine the key actors in the process of executive search globalization – leading global firms – and offer an interpretation of the forces producing the contemporary organizational strategies of global executive search. The Globalization of Executive Search documents the forms of institutional work that have legitimated the role of executive in elite labor markets and created demand for the services of global firms; this exposes not only the changing geographies of executive search, but also how executive search has established itself as a new knowledge intensive professional service. The authors reveal how the globalization of executive search is exemplary of the processes by which a range of new knowledge intensive professional services have come to be globally recognized, approaching the heart of contemporary capitalism.