The Relationship Between Intellectual Capital and Sustainability: An Analysis of Practitioner’s Thought

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how intellectual capital (IC) and sustainability influence each other in practitioners’ perspective. Three steps methodology was applied to reach this purpose. First, the study employs a text mining analysis of 1651 posts published by practitioners in one of the leading sources of sustainability: the website CSRwire.com. Concepts extracted from the posts are then analyzed using a factor analysis to summarize them within themes. Finally, themes are analyzed to identify how IC and sustainability influence each other using a correlation analysis. Results show that IC and sustainability are complex topics. Practitioners discuss 17 main themes split into Financial (also known as Economic), Social and Environmental sustainability. The three main components of IC: human capital, relational capital and structural capital connect with most of these themes proving that IC and sustainability influence each other.