Table 1

Corporate heritage practices supporting IC: theory-informed perspectives

IC component and potentially supporting corporate heritage practicesPotential mechanisms and supporting theoriesEntropic IC model perspective
IC component:
Human capital
Corporate heritage practices:
Corporate heritage transmission and storytelling practices (e.g. mentoring/apprenticeships, elicitation from veteran workers, heritage storytelling)
Potential Mechanisms:
These corporate heritage practices may strengthen employees’ knowledge, attraction, and commitment through complementary mechanisms of identity-based attachment and learning-based transmission
Supporting theories: Social identity theory; Organisational learning theory
These corporate heritage practices may act as integrators, combining historically accumulated know-how, emotional attachment, and values-based meanings into operational human capital
IC component:
Structural capital
Corporate heritage practices:
Corporate heritage practices to identify, store and reuse historical assets and knowledge (e.g. mapping/assessment, archiving, digitisation, codification, retrieval governance)
Potential Mechanisms:
These corporate heritage practices may strengthen support for the organisational infrastructure that stores and channels knowledge through mechanisms of historical knowledge codification, archiving, and interpretive stabilisation
Supporting theories: Knowledge-based view; Organisational memory; Sensemaking theory
These practices may act as integrators by combining cognitive historical knowledge and meaning with infrastructures/rules (standards, taxonomies, access policies) thereby operationalising dispersed potential resources (knowledge) into repositories, routines, and retrieval systems (operational SC)
IC component:
Relational capital
Corporate heritage practices:
Corporate heritage re-actualisation, role-identity extension and communication practices (e.g. heritage branding, community partnerships, territorial initiatives, stakeholder narratives)
Potential Mechanisms:
These corporate heritage practices may strengthen relationships with stakeholders by signalling credibility (trust), legitimacy, and symbolic resonance
Supporting theories: Signalling theory; Institutional theory; Cultural capital theory
These practices may act as integrators, combining historically rooted identity meanings with contemporary social concerns and territorial-cultural linkages into relational resources such as trust, affinity, and legitimacy (operational RC)
IC component:
Cross-component (IC growth/renewal)
Corporate heritage practices:
Corporate heritage practices aimed at monitoring, updating, and reinterpreting heritage resources over time (e.g. adaptive re-actualisation of heritage meanings)
Potential Mechanisms:
These practices may support the growth/renewal of IC over time by sustaining organisational learning and recombination processes that refresh historically rooted knowledge and meanings, thereby enlarging and renewing the firm’s potential IC (Balmer, 2013)
Supporting theories: Dynamic capabilities theory; Intellectual capital-based view
These corporate heritage practices may sustain the unfolding of the dynamic capabilities that enact the innovation and learning process that allows the potential IC to renew and expand over time
Source(s): Authors’ elaboration

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