Intangible Assets and Social, Intellectual and Cultural Capital: Origins, Functions and Value

Intangible assets form part of the true value of organisations. These assets are produced from various forms of capital other than financial capital, which are located in the intellectual, structural and customer domains of organisations. This paper reports the findings from 15 cases from an empirical study of large UK service organisations to which we applied the concepts of social, intellectual and cultural capital as analytical tools to interpret the data concerned with intangible assets. We explore these forms of capital through identifying their origins and their functions. The paper identifies links between the value of these forms of capital and reports on how this value may be measured with pragmatic measures. The paper also considers the feasibility of aggregating the full value of organisations into their individual national economies. The research has produced two paradoxes relating to the development of intangible assets to test in future research.