Foundations for a theory of conversion between real value, perceived value and captured value

Language: this is the English version. A versão original em português está em Fundamentos para uma teoria da conversão entre valor real, valor percebido e valor capturado.

1. The value one holds and the value others can see

Two people with comparable training, comparable experience and equivalent technical competence can occupy very different positions in the mind of whoever decides to hire them, promote them, listen to them, recommend them or trust them with responsibility. The observation is commonplace, and it is precisely because it is commonplace that it tends to be misused: it does not follow that communication is the cause of the difference. Careers are produced by a long combination of factors, among them human capital, performance, social ties, economic conditions, social origin, institutional position, personality, the luck of opportunity, and structures that favour some people and constrain others.

Within that system, however, there is one question with a shape of its own, and it is the only one this article addresses: the value a person holds and the value others manage to perceive in them are not necessarily equivalent. Knowledge is not observed in full. Experience has to be interpreted. Competence almost always has to be inferred before it can be demonstrated, and trust is extended before there is proof. In a good share of the decisions that matter, third parties choose without access to the actual characteristics of the person being assessed.

Signalling theory explains why this is not a failure on the part of the decider but a condition of the problem. Spence¹³ showed that, faced with attributes they cannot observe, agents fall back on signals in order to make inferences and reduce informational asymmetry. What is known about a person therefore depends as much on the signals available for interpreting them as on their objective characteristics.

Communication is an unusually broad source of such signals. Speech, writing, argument, non-verbal behaviour, presence, choice of vocabulary, narrative, silence, public exposure, digital interaction — all of it feeds the formation of impressions about competence, credibility, identity and worth. And it does so even when there is no intention to construct any impression at all. Hence the double nature of the phenomenon: a person chooses part of what they communicate, but does not control the meanings that will be attached to what they communicated.

The literature already examines nearly every piece of this, separately. There is research on communication competence; research on reputation, status, impression management, personal branding, political skill and forms of capital; and work relating social and verbal abilities to educational and occupational outcomes. What does not exist is the stitching. Each tradition investigates one stretch of the route with instruments of its own, and nobody asks about the route as a whole.

This article proposes to ask exactly that: to what extent does communication participate in converting the value a person actually holds into perceived value and, subsequently, into value captured in their social and professional life? It is to investigate that distance that the concept of Communicational Capital is proposed.

The proposal is not meant to displace reputation, social capital, symbolic capital, communication competence or political skill. Its worth depends on demonstrating the opposite of what is usually asserted by anyone launching a new concept: that there is a phenomenon here distinct enough, and empirically useful enough, to warrant a name of its own. This article does not set out to prove that Communicational Capital exists. It sets out to make the hypothesis precise enough to be tested — and, if it comes to that, refuted.

2. What this article is, and what it is not

This is a theoretical-conceptual article supported by a problem-driven narrative review. It is neither a systematic nor a scoping review; no claim is made to exhaustive coverage of the literature, nor is it assumed that the works examined exhaust the available evidence.

The construction was organised around five cores: communication and communication competence; signalling and informational asymmetry; social perception, reputation, status and influence; political skill, impression management and personal branding; and theories of capital, with particular attention to social capital, symbolic capital, and the direct antecedent that is Malmelin’s communication capital⁹.

The procedure serves one specific purpose: to establish whether findings already settled in different fields can sustain an integrative model in which communication participates in forming perceptual resources that accumulate and convert. That choice carries a hazard which needs recording at the outset, since it is the method’s principal risk. Evidence for each link in a chain does not demonstrate the validity of the chain as a new construct. The integration will amount to a scientific contribution only if Communicational Capital subsequently shows discriminant validity, incremental explanatory power, and the possibility of operationalisation.

3. The core problem: real value is not perceived value

One distinction organises the whole model. We shall call Real Value the set of resources a person actually holds or is able to demonstrate: knowledge, experience, competences, technical capability, delivery record and other attributes relevant to the context under analysis. The word “real” does not suggest that human or professional worth reduces to an objective measure; it serves only to distinguish what is held from what is attributed by an observer. We shall call Perceived Value the assessment third parties construct concerning those resources.

The two levels can diverge, and they diverge in both directions. A highly competent person may be systematically underestimated; another may be overestimated for years; in some settings perception and performance correspond with reasonable accuracy. Signalling theory accounts for why such divergences are possible: when the relevant quality cannot be observed, the receiver has to infer it from whatever is available¹³.

4. Communication as a system of signals

Communication does not reduce to speech, and treating it that way would sink the model at the first step. The National Communication Association describes the field as the study of how people use messages to generate meaning across contexts, covering the forms, modes, media and consequences of communication¹¹. It is that breadth which matters here.

Potentially relevant are verbal and vocal signals, non-verbal behaviour, visual register, written text, observed conduct, relational position, digital trace, and the symbolic repertoire with which someone presents themselves. A public talk offers signals; a negotiation offers signals; a published article offers signals. The way someone listens, answers an objection, introduces an unwelcome idea or behaves under pressure is informative too — often more informative than the intended content.

Part of these signals is emitted deliberately. Another part escapes. The formulation therefore cannot rest on strategic communication alone: some people build communicational reputation without ever having given a thought to personal branding, and others invest deliberately in positioning and reap little, because the signals produced were not read as intended. Intention belongs to the sender; perception belongs to the relation between signal, receiver and context.

5. From impression to capital

If a single talk changes an audience’s opinion, a communicational effect has occurred. That still does not amount to capital. The idea of capital demands a further property, which is accumulation.

The literature on personal reputation helps describe that transition. Individual reputation within organisations consists of assessments formed socially over time which produce subsequent consequences; the two studies by Zinko and colleagues relate personal reputation to antecedents such as human capital and social effectiveness, and to consequences such as autonomy, power and career success^15,16.

There is, then, a difference between what someone produces inside an interaction and what they carry into the next one. An unknown professional has to demonstrate competence at length before receiving trust; another, whose reputation already circulates, begins the same conversation with credit already extended. Their history arrives before they do. It is this gap between the present message and the expectations accumulated around the speaker that licenses, at least as a working hypothesis, the use of the word capital.

6. The proposed definition

On those premises, we propose:

Communicational Capital is the set of perceptual resources, intentionally or unintentionally formed, associated with an individual and accumulated through the social interpretation of their communicative signals, which may be mobilised in the conversion of real value into perceived value and captured value.

The formulation carries five elements, none of them ornamental. Drop any one and the construct ceases to be what it claims.

6.1 Perceptual resources

Communicational Capital does not reside in the individual but in what exists in other people’s perception of them. It is this property that separates it from an internal skill and makes it, by definition, a resource nobody controls — only influences.

6.2 Intentional or unintentional formation

The capital may result from deliberate effort — talks, publications, positioning, brand-building — or emerge from ordinary interaction, with no plan behind it. It can be managed, but it does not depend on conscious management in order to exist. People who have never given the matter a thought have one too.

6.3 Accumulation

Episodic impressions do not constitute capital. The hypothesis requires the perceptions produced to show some degree of persistence over time — to survive the encounter in which they were born.

6.4 Communicational origin

The construct seeks to isolate that share of perceptual resources whose formation, maintenance or activation depends on communicative signals. This does not imply that all reputation is communicational, nor that every social assessment originates in communication.

6.5 Convertibility

For “capital” to be more than rhetoric, these resources must be shown to produce effects beyond the communicative act itself. Trust, attention, recognition, authority, influence, access and opportunity are possible conversions. Economic outcomes are a later possibility, deliberately kept outside the core of the definition — for the methodological reasons set out in section 13.

7. Antecedents and adjacent constructs

The principal theoretical threat to this proposal is not a shortage of literature. It is a surplus. There is settled research on neighbouring phenomena, and the validity of Communicational Capital depends on showing that it is not merely a new name for something already satisfactorily explained. This section exists to argue against the proposal.

7.1 Communication capital

Malmelin⁹ used the expression communication capital explicitly, modelling corporate communication as an organisational asset within the intellectual-capital literature, with legal, organisational, human and relational dimensions. It is an indispensable antecedent, and the terminological proximity obliges explicit acknowledgement. The clearest difference lies in the unit of analysis: Malmelin works with the organisation; the formulation developed here starts from the individual and the perceptual resources socially associated with them.

7.2 Communication competence

The interpersonal-studies tradition defines communication competence as the capacity to perform behaviours that are effective and appropriate to the context¹⁴. Communicational Capital designates a different level. An excellent young lecturer, on their first day, may display very high communication competence and possess almost no accumulated recognition beyond the room they are standing in. In the other direction, someone with an established reputation can give a poor talk without losing, that afternoon, the perceptual resource attached to their name. Competence is capacity; capital is accumulated resource. The distinction is theoretically plausible and will nonetheless have to be demonstrated with data.

7.3 Reputation

Reputation is probably the closest construct — and the most dangerous. Organisational research treats personal reputation as a social assessment built over time, and has demonstrated empirical relations between its antecedents and relevant consequences¹⁶. Communicational Capital cannot be defined as “what people think about someone”: that already has a name. The proposed boundary lies in the causal cut and in convertibility — investigating specifically those perceptual resources tied to communicative signals and their part in converting originating resources into outcomes. That boundary is a wager, and it is among the first things that will have to be tested.

7.4 Political skill

Political skill describes the capacity to understand others at work and use that understanding to influence them in service of personal or organisational ends³. A meta-analysis found positive associations with productivity, career success and personal reputation, among other outcomes¹⁰. The challenge is blunt: if the new variable explains nothing beyond what political skill already explains, its theoretical necessity disappears. The intended difference is temporal — not the individual’s present social skill, but the perceptual resource that remains attached to them when they are not in the room.

7.5 Impression management and personal branding

Leary and Kowalski⁷ framed impression management in two components: the motivation to produce a given impression, and the construction of that impression. Personal branding, in turn, is treated in interdisciplinary review as a strategic process of constructing, positioning and maintaining an impression before relevant audiences, resting on foundations drawn from sociology, psychology, marketing and economics⁵. Both emphasise management. Communicational Capital means to include what accumulates without any plan, and so personal branding can be understood as one possible practice for managing this capital — not as its equivalent. That relation is a theoretical hypothesis, not an established result.

7.6 Symbolic capital

The hardest relation is with Bourdieu¹. Symbolic capital involves social recognition and the capacity of diverse properties to acquire force once perceived and legitimated within a field. If Communicational Capital is defined merely as recognition or prestige produced by communication, it becomes a dispensable subclass of symbolic capital — and should be abandoned.

The proposed differentiation is narrower: to isolate the process and the resource tied to the capacity of communicative signals to render other resources socially legible and mobilisable. This does not dissolve the proximity. An entirely possible future conclusion is that Communicational Capital is better explained as a mechanism producing or converting symbolic capital than as an independent form of capital. The theory has to remain open to that outcome, not least because it would not be a defeat: it would be a finding.

8. The proposed mechanism

The model can be described, provisionally, across five levels. The first is Real Value: knowledge, experience, competence, performance record and other resources actually held. The second is Communicational Expression, that is, the signals by which part of those resources becomes observable. The third is Social Interpretation: the inferences receivers produce from the available signals and the context. The fourth is Perceptual Accumulation, formed by those perceptions that persist long enough to remain attached to the individual. The fifth is Conversion — the possibility that these resources later bear on trust, recognition, authority, influence, access, preference and opportunity.

The sequence is not linear, and presenting it as linear would be the likeliest misreading of the model. Outcomes obtained later alter earlier perceptions; status changes how messages are interpreted; prior reputation alters expectations; new conduct appreciates or depreciates resources already accumulated. The structure has feedback, not one-way causation.

9. Real, perceived and captured value

To investigate the economic consequences of the phenomenon it helps to add a third level. To Real Value (what the person holds or delivers) and Perceived Value (what third parties attribute to them) we add Captured Value: the share of that value which comes to produce an observable consequence for them.

Depending on context, Captured Value appears in pay, promotion, hierarchical position, opportunities, clients, invitations, prices charged, referrals received, access, and influence within the organisation. The distinction avoids the error of equating recognition with economic outcome — an error the personal-branding literature commits routinely. A person may be widely recognised and capture little. Another may capture a great deal for reasons having nothing to do with their Communicational Capital. These are relations to be examined, not assumed.

10. The Communication Toll

The distance between value held and value captured allows a derived hypothesis, and it is from this that the article draws its most concrete consequence.

The Communication Toll is the relative loss of recognition, opportunity or outcome associated with insufficient levels of Communicational Capital relative to the value the person actually holds.

The toll is not a synonym for speaking badly, and it does not mean that every poor outcome follows from deficient communication. The hypothesis is comparative, and makes sense only between like cases. Consider two people with sufficiently similar human capital, performance and context. If one manages to render their resources legible, accumulates recognition and converts that recognition into opportunity with little friction, while the other meets systematic difficulty along the same route, there is a difference open to investigation.

The testable formulation would be: holding other relevant conditions comparable, individuals with lower Communicational Capital will show greater relative loss in the conversion of Real Value into Perceived Value and Captured Value.

The effect, if it exists, is likely to be cumulative, and that is what makes it hard to see. An opportunity not obtained alters subsequent experience. A promotion deferred affects pay, network and exposure at once. A referral that never happens removes a possibility before the person who lost it is even aware of it — nobody misses the conversation they never had. The cost of low Communicational Capital shows up less in the isolated episode than in the trajectory.

11. Indirect evidence

As far as the literature consulted for this article reaches, no study tests Communicational Capital directly as defined here. There is evidence bearing on parts of the mechanism, and it is necessary to state precisely what each piece supports and, above all, what it does not.

Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua⁶ showed that cognitive and non-cognitive abilities account for a broad range of economic and social outcomes, including schooling choices, employment and wages, and that non-cognitive abilities affect wages even controlling for schooling. The finding should not be pushed further than it goes: the non-cognitive factors measured there are self-esteem and locus of control, not communication competence. What the study establishes is the starting point, not the thesis — labour-market outcomes do not rest on cognitive capital and credentials alone.

Closer to the object, Forrest and Swanton⁴ followed 4,704 Australians aged 15 to 19 over two years and found that problem-solving, creativity, teamwork and verbal communication were associated, alternately, with later secondary-school performance, hourly wage and employment status, controlling for demographic characteristics and prior academic performance. Three caveats must travel with the citation, on pain of the evidence being used beyond what it permits: the skills were self-reported, the associations are alternate — none of the four predicted every outcome — and the design is associational.

In one specific professional slice, Otto and colleagues¹² found, among 164 psychologists, an association between communication skills and objective career success measured by salary and position, while cooperation skills tracked subjective success. The sample is small, the design cross-sectional, the skills self-assessed, and there is no control for technical competence. It is an indication, not a demonstration.

The political-skill literature adds that interpersonal ability and capacity for influence relate to occupational outcomes: the meta-analysis by Munyon and colleagues¹⁰ found positive associations with productivity, career success and personal reputation. And labour economics has documented the structural shift that makes the question more pressing: between 1980 and 2012, occupations demanding intensive social interaction grew by nearly twelve percentage points as a share of the United States workforce, while mathematically intensive but less social occupations contracted².

What is missing, however, is precisely the piece the Toll hypothesis would need. In the databases consulted for this article, no published empirical estimate was located of the loss in wages or opportunity attributable specifically to low communication competence with a control for measured technical competence. The existing literature estimates returns to social skills conditional on cognitive ability — which is not the same thing as occupational technical competence. Nobody has compared, so far as could be verified, the technically competent but communicationally weak professional against a technically equivalent peer. Absence of located evidence is not proof of non-existence, and the search did not cover grey literature, theses, or publications outside indexed databases.

12. Propositions

The integration above allows six preliminary propositions. Each carries risk: if the predicted effect fails to appear, the theory will have to change.

13. How to measure it

There would be a serious methodological inconsistency in defining a phenomenon as perceptual and then measuring it through the person themselves. The prospective Communicational Capital Index has to be, by construction, a multi-method instrument. No validated index exists today, and building one will have to proceed in stages.

The first source is assessment of communicational characteristics: competences and behaviours capable of producing relevant signals. The second is hetero-perception — assessment by third parties belonging to the contexts that actually matter for that individual. Among the dimensions to be investigated, rather than assumed, are perceived clarity, credibility, perceived competence, trust, differentiation, memorability, recognition and perceived capacity for influence. The third source is observable outcomes, checked against the index without being folded into it.

That last separation is not a technicality. If salary or promotion enter the measure of the capital, they cannot afterwards be used independently to test whether the capital predicts salary or promotion. The instrument would demonstrate itself, and that is how constructs are born dead.

14. Empirical agenda

14.1 Is there a distinct construct?

The index will have to be compared against validated measures of communication competence, reputation, political skill, social capital, status, impression management, communicative self-efficacy and other pertinent constructs. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses will establish whether the items converge on a structure of their own. If they do not, two explanations must be entertained with equal seriousness: the scale may be badly built, or Communicational Capital may not be an independent construct. Ruling out the second in advance would invalidate the test.

14.2 Does it add explanation?

Discriminant validity is not enough; the construct has to be useful. One possible design compares successive models: the first with human capital and context (education, experience, performance, social capital, personality, sector, position and sociodemographic controls); the second adding established interpersonal variables (communication competence, reputation, political skill); the third adding the index. There is a single question: how much explanatory or predictive power does Communicational Capital add? If the gain is negligible, the scientific case for the construct weakens, and that has to be stated plainly.

14.3 Temporal precedence

Correlation between Communicational Capital and career success establishes no direction. Successful people may receive more deference simply because they already hold status — social hierarchy is known to be self-reinforcing⁸. Reducing that problem requires a longitudinal design, with measurements at baseline, six, twelve and twenty-four months. The question stops being whether successful people score highly and becomes whether today’s score helps predict tomorrow’s change.

14.4 Intervention

The strongest causal evidence will require intervention, with groups undergoing systematic development of communicative competences compared against controls, measured before and after. The full mechanism to be tested is: communicational intervention → behavioural change → change in third-party perception → accumulation of Communicational Capital → subsequent consequence. Any link that fails forces a revision of the model, and the likeliest to fail is the third.

15. Limitations and conditions of validity

Communicational Capital overlaps potentially and substantially with symbolic capital, reputation, political skill and communication competence. Coining a name is not a scientific contribution. The theory justifies itself only by demonstrating identifiable boundaries and explaining something the existing variables do not explain well.

There is a second problem, of another order. Careers are produced by complex systems: schooling, experience, performance, socioeconomic origin, networks, personality, organisational structure, economic conditions and access to resources all bear on what a person can achieve, and structural inequalities shape trajectories independently of merit or of communication. Any theory holding that prosperity or career is determined by communicative capacity is empirically untenable, and this article does not advance one.

The proposition maintained here is narrower: communication may explain a share of the variance between the value people hold and the value they manage to render perceptible and capture. Which share? Not yet known. Determining that magnitude is part of the agenda, not a detail to be settled later.

Finally, the word “capital” will itself have to earn its place. The phenomenon will need to display features consistent with accumulation, relative persistence, appreciation, depreciation, mobilisation and convertibility. Should those features fail to appear, “capital” will have been a serviceable metaphor and an inadequate scientific concept — and that possibility must stay open until the data close it.

16. Theoretical implications

The proposal produces four displacements. The first is to move beyond communication as competence and ask about its cumulative consequences. The second is to separate competence from recognition, treating them as distinct levels rather than synonyms. The third is to introduce time: if there is capital, the individual does not begin each interaction from zero. The fourth is to introduce conversion — accumulated perceptions become theoretically interesting once they alter probabilities beyond the communicative act itself.

The question thus ceases to be “how well does this person communicate?” and becomes: what does this communication accumulate socially, and what does that accumulation allow them to convert?

17. Practical implications

If the model holds empirically, the way communicational development is evaluated changes. Training programmes generally end their assessment at the skill: the participant improved in delivery, clarity, confidence, presentation. Communicational Capital adds two further questions, and it is these that matter to whoever pays for the training. Did the improvement alter the perception third parties hold of that person? And did that alteration produce an observable consequence?

The evaluation chain becomes: learning → behaviour → perception → accumulation → conversion → outcome. This makes it possible to distinguish someone who learned communication techniques from someone who actually changed their Communicational Capital — a distinction virtually no programme can currently draw.

18. Concluding remarks

Saying that communication matters founds no theory. The relevant problem is to determine how it matters, how much, in which contexts and through which mechanisms.

The literature has shown that people fall back on signals when they cannot observe relevant attributes; that interpersonal abilities bear on occupational outcomes; that reputations accumulate and carry consequences; that social and political competences relate to careers; and that recognition can turn resources into social force. Communicational Capital proposes to investigate one specific intersection of these phenomena, on the central hypothesis that part of the value a person holds must become socially perceptible before it can enter certain decisions — and that communication is one of the mechanisms of that transformation.

One consequence is worth recording. People may differ not only in the amount of knowledge, experience or competence they hold, but in the efficiency with which they make those resources recognisable and mobilisable in the environments where they operate. Where that conversion meets difficulty associated with low Communicational Capital, we propose the hypothesis of the Communication Toll. The economic question that follows is direct: how much of the value a person holds goes unrecognised or uncaptured because their Communicational Capital is insufficient?

Answering that means giving up intuition as proof. It will require measuring the construct, showing it to be distinct from existing ones, following individuals over time, and establishing how much it explains once competing variables are controlled. Should it fail those tests, it must be reformulated or abandoned. Should it survive, it opens an agenda with consequences for communication, careers, leadership, education and organisational studies.

The theory’s potential contribution therefore does not lie in asserting that better communicators win — a proposition science would struggle to sustain. It lies in demonstrating something at once narrower and more consequential: that a share of the economic and social value of human competences may depend on the capacity to render them perceptible, recognisable and mobilisable through communication. It is that share which the theory of Communicational Capital sets out to identify, measure and explain.

References

Every reference was checked against a bibliographic database or the primary source. Where only the direction of the finding could be confirmed, and not the figures, the reference says so.