Value as capital-in-use: Unpacking the temporal impacts and managerial implications for organisational value

Value is a widely researched and much debated topic, but one still characterised by conceptual deficiencies. While multiple competing value perspectives exists in the current literature, they provide limited insights in terms of temporal impacts and implications for organisational value creation. To address this gap, this conceptual article develops the notion of value as capital-in-use, which complements extant value literature by providing a capital-oriented perspective and conceptualisation of the nature, characteristics, and dimensions of value. We develop the concept by reviewing four categories of capital (physical, financial, knowledge, and social), and unpacking their dimensions in terms of locus, latency, temporality and convertibility, to distinguish the implications they each hold as potential sources of organisational value. Variations in the properties of the four categories of capital have management implications that are typically poorly recognised, especially in terms of costs and risk associated with latent or perishable capital. This paper contributes to current value theory by establishing its relationship to capital, and extending coverage of the temporal dimension of value.