Intellectual capital and the firm: evolution and research trends
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-12-2018-0221 |
| Pages | 555-580 |
| Published date | 05 September 2019 |
| Date | 05 September 2019 |
| Author | Gregorio Martín-de Castro,Isabel Díez-Vial,Miriam Delgado-Verde |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Intellectual capital and the firm:
evolution and research trends
Gregorio Martín-de Castro, Isabel Díez-Vial and
Miriam Delgado-Verde
Department of Management and Marketing,
Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Purpose –The phenomenon of intellectual capital in the firm has been deeply researched and immensely
debated in the management literature in recent years. After three decades of evolution, it has become
established as a mature field of research. At this point, a review of its theoretical foundations and current and
future evolution provides us with the state of the art of intellectual capital in the firm. The purpose of this
paper is to present a quantitative review of the existing literature on intellectual capital in the firm.
Design/methodology/approach –In this paper, the authors present a quantitative review of the existing
literature on intellectual capital in the firm. To do so, the authors searched the JCR-SSCI database from 1990 to
2016 and identified 553 citing documents; these were split into three main periods in order to identify the
interactions and path dependencies existing between different foundations of research. In addition, areas of
current and future research connected with the theoretical foundations were identified. For these purposes,
the authors used both co-citation analyses as well as bibliographical coupling.
Findings –In this paper, three main stages of IC evolution have been identified with the main topics and
research frames, as well as their path dependencies. Additionally, four main areas of current and future
development of IC have been identified: IC measurement, IC in new business models, IC disclosure, and itsrole
in social capital and human resource practices.
Research limitations/implications –The present bibliometric study is a quantitative review of papers
published in the Web of Science database.
Originality/value –By its dimensions ‒broad academic disciplines and longitudinal character ‒this
bibliometric study constitutes a new quantitative review of the IC discipline, both drawing its intellectual
evolution in the last decades, and showing current and future research trends in IC and the firm.
Keywords State of the art, Co-citation analysis, Path dependence, Bibliografical coupling,
Quantitative review
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
Intellectual capital has become a vibrant topic in the management research field and more
specifically in strategic management and accounting. Originally coined by Galbraith (1969)
and disseminated by Stewart (1991) among management scholars during the nineties of the
twentieth century, the use of the word “capital”to denominate all of these types of intangible
or knowledge assets was a result of the economic roots of the concept, which was used to
describe the company’s value-creation process based on this bundle of assets. Nevertheless,
the term “capital”has proven controversial (Martín-de Castro et al., 2011).
The rise of a “knowledge-based economy”(Teece, 1998; Dean and Kretschmer, 2007) or a
“post-capitalist society”(Drucker, 1993) in the last decades of the twentieth century put the focus
on knowledge and intellectual capital as major production factors responsible for the economic
and financial prosperity of nations as well as key drivers of companies’sustained competitive
advantages. In this way, the management of IC has become a key management task.
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 20 No. 4, 2019
pp. 555-580
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-12-2018-0221
Received 20 December 2018
Revised 12 February 2019
6 May 2019
Accepted 29 June 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1469-1930.htm
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministries of Science and Innovation, and
Economy and Competitiveness (Grants Nos RTI2018-100823-B-I00; ECO2017-85763-R; ECO2015-65251-P;
and ECO2012-38190). The authors also would like to express their gratitude for the financial support
provided by Banco Santander and Complutense University of Madrid (Grants Nos PR26/16-5B-1 and PR26/
16-15B-1 and B-5).
555
Intellectual
capital and the
firm
Especially coming from the resource-based view (Barney, 1991), scholars highlighted the
strategic character of IC responsible for sustained competitive advantage due to its rareness,
value, as well as difficulties in its imitation or substitution.
Considering IC and the firm as a research tradition, two main features can be highlighted.
The first one is its eclectic character in which different disciplines in the management
literature frame it from very different perspectives (Carayannis et al., 2014) and units of
analysis (Pedro et al., 2018). The second one is its recently reached maturity stage, as stated
by some scholars from different traditions (Martín-de Castro et al., 2011; Martín-de Castro,
2014; Secundo et al., 2018). Following Vogel and Güttel (2013), previous IC features
recommend the development systematic and quantitative literature research in order to
structure IC research stream evolution and recent trends to current IC academic eclectic
debate, as well as to provide some useful management orientation and practice.
In this vein, qualitative and quantitative review and analysis of the existing literature
have shed some light on this research field (see e.g. Serenko and Bontis, 2004; Serenko et al.,
2010; Inkinen, 2015; Pedro et al., 2018). However, there are no previous studies that have
presented a comprehensive and structured look at the evolution of and future trends in IC.
This is due to their narrow focus on a few academic journals in the intellectual capital/
knowledge management fields or only on empirical research and their descriptive analysis
of only the most prominent publications, authors, journals, etc.
Research on IC is still fragmented and far from conclusive. As Serenko and Bontis (2004,
2013) and Deanand Kretschmer (2007) state,although the interest inand popularity of IC have
increased exponentially over the lasttwo decades for both academics and practitioners, some
of the initialgeneral reviews of IC, as Martín-deCastro et al. (2011), were sometimessubjective
or based on personal impressions. Nevertheless, more recent works such as Dumay et al.
(2015), focusing on theIC and the public sector, or Buenechea-Elberdin (2017), focusing on IC
and innovation,offer rigorous, systematicand structured literaturereviews, however; theyare
narrow in scope. Consequently, there is a need to identify the dominant factors and the
intellectual evolution over time of this important management research stream.
In that sense, our research proposes a quantitative, structured, longitudinal review of
intellectual capital incorporating different theoretical foundations coming from different
disciplines and their interactions and evolution over time. This provides a very useful and
novel framework for understanding the nature and implications of intellectual capital in the
firm. In addition, an analysis of the main areas of future development in the field can give
the scientific community an opportunity to continue analyzing future lines of research into
intellectual capital. As indicated by Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro (2004) and Vogel
and Güttel (2013), studies offering this kind of quantitative review are appropriate and
relevant when disciplines and research fields reach a certain degree of maturity.
The aforementioned necessity to focus on the evolution and the main recent trends in the
field of IC is a generalized claim in strategic management. There is an excessive
fragmentation of research that impedes the appropriate consolidation and advancement of
this relatively new discipline, which suffers from a lack of integration and coherent
theoretical frameworks, organizational phenomena and scope.
Thus, a longitudinal and more comprehensive approach is needed that includes a
complete and updated period of time (1990‒2016). Using different perspectives of social
sciences, such as management, business, economics and accounting, and analyzing their
interactions over time could provide a useful framework for understanding the nature and
effects of intellectual capital management in the firm.
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of the field
of intellectual capital. To do so, we conduct a quantitative review of the existing literature on
IC in the firm, identifying its intellectual foundations from a longitudinal perspective and
analyzing the existence of interactions between different research traditions in the same
556
JIC
20,4
To continue reading
Request your trial