This site is written in Portuguese. This page is the entry point for English-speaking readers, and links to the material that exists in English.
Capital Comunicacional — Communicational Capital — is a formulation developed by Heverson Barbosa concerning a specific problem: knowledge, experience and competence are not directly observable, so decisions about people are made from signals. A large share of those signals comes from how a person communicates, including when they are not trying to communicate anything. The formulation asks what accumulates from that, and what the accumulation allows a person to convert.
The work is in its construction phase. Terms are being defined, the population for a first study is being specified, and no measurement instrument has yet been validated. Nothing here is presented as a settled result, and the material states plainly what would have to happen for the construct to be abandoned.
Everything else is in Portuguese, including the core definition, the theory pages, the documented foundations and the essay archive. The most useful starting points:
Three terms recur and are translated consistently throughout the English material. Real Value is what a person actually holds or can deliver. Perceived Value is what others attribute to them. Captured Value is the share of that value which produces an observable consequence. The gap between the first and the last, where it is associated with low Communicational Capital, is what the working paper calls the Communication Toll.
Note on the expression itself: “capital comunicacional” and “communication capital” appear in earlier academic work by other authors, and the working paper acknowledges those antecedents explicitly. What is proposed here is a specific formulation at the level of the individual, not ownership of the words.