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This study aims to explore the moderating effects of strategy on the relationship between working capital management (WCM) and profitability.

A data sample of 72,444 firm-year observations of US-listed firms during 2000–2020 was used. The research hypotheses were tested using a panel regression analysis and an appropriate research instrument that signifies a firm’s strategic positioning.

The prospecting (defending) strategy has a decreasing (increasing) moderating effect on the relationship between WCM and profitability. The empirical findings are not affected by the level of earnings management, the presence of motives to meet earnings targets or the intensity of unreported intangible assets. Additionally, the reported empirical results remain robust within the context of propensity score matching regression analysis, in the presence of nonlinear effects of WCM on profitability, when alternative measures of WCM are used, and between firms with an increase or decrease in future profitability or different levels of efficiency on net WCM investments.

This study may stimulate future research exploring the moderating effects of various variables on the relationship between WCM and operating performance.

The findings highlight the importance of strategy for improving the performance evaluation of WCM policies and the prediction accuracy of the consequences of a strategy on short-term operating performance.

Prior empirical research has documented either a negative or positive relationship between WCM and profitability, which implies the presence of moderating effects of various factors. This study provides empirical evidence of the moderating effects of strategy on the relationship between WCM and profitability.

This study aims to explore the effects of intellectual capital (IC) on the occurrence of a modified audit opinion decision. The authors expect that high IC intensive firms are positively associated with the occurrence of a modified audit opinion since they are associated with an increased business risk and are more likely to exhibit issues concerning their financial health and stability.

Using a data sample of 423 listed firms from Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal over a 10-year period, the authors estimated a logistic regression model to examine the effects of IC on the probability that a modified audit opinion is issued. The authors used organizational capital as a measure of a firm’s intensity on IC.

Empirical findings indicate a significant and positive relationship between the IC and the likelihood of a firm receiving a modified audit opinion decision.

This study expands prior literature by exploring the predictive ability of IC on the likelihood of a firm receiving a modified audit opinion decision.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship of intellectual capital (IC) with the strategy of small-medium enterprises (SMEs) and their executive decisions regarding the strategy of their IC portfolio during a financial crisis.

The analysis is informed by the responses of 162 Greek SMEs on a structured questionnaire. Greek SMEs constitute an appropriate research setting since they operate within an environment of economic recession, financial turbulence and operational uncertainty.

Initial analysis indicates that SMEs’ strategic position seems to affect the composition of their IC portfolio, especially when a SME is strategically classified as Analytic according to Miles and Snow's (1978) typology. Moreover, Greek SMEs do not seem to follow the suggested by literature executive decisions for the strategic management of their IC portfolio. They apply on their IC components strategies that could be classified as “Act” or “Analyse” under Wissenzbilanz's typology (Bornemann and Alwert, 2007) regardless of the prospects for improvement expected for these IC components. Therefore, while SMEs seem to care about their IC, they do not manage it in a coherent and strategically beneficial way.

The study applies a novel methodology. By properly adapting the Wissenzbilanz's typology for IC executive decisions, it provides a research approach for collecting cross sectional firm data for IC executive decisions. A possible limitation but also an area for future research is to examine the implications of the relations between SMEs’ strategy and IC portfolio on SMEs’ financial performance.

The practical implications of this study are twofold. First, managers should take into consideration that IC seems to be a strategic enabler even in periods of financial crisis and, thus, decisions regarding IC investments should not be abandoned. Second, SMEs tend to follow different than the recommended by literature executive decisions for the components of their IC portfolio. This might reduce the potential returns on IC investment. Therefore randomly investing in IC will not result in the expected benefits.

The contribution of this study is that explores the relations of SMEs’ executive decisions in relation to the strategic management of their IC components as well as the influence that the strategic position of SMEs exerts on the composition of their IC portfolio during a financial crisis.

This study seeks to examine how the quantitative semantics of the learning curve phenomenon can be employed in order to derive monetary information for team learning observed within knowledge‐intensive production environments.

Software development is selected as an identical example of a team‐based, knowledge‐intensive production environment. The interaction of learning rate of the developer teams and the improvements on their average solving time (i.e. productivity) is modelled as a Lotka‐Volterra predator‐prey interacting populations system establishing a causal relationship between the human capital (HC) of organizational teams and the observed learning curve effects on their performance. In addition, empirical evidence illustrates that the estimated learning rates capture the entire range of team learning effects on performance fluctuations caused by the HC.

The fluctuations on the learning rates can be interpreted as a result of the HC variability across the population of developer teams. Hence, the cost implications of the HC within knowledge‐intensive production environments can be rationalised using the quantitative semantics of the learning curve phenomenon

The learning curve is associated with the cost side of the organizational income‐generating process limiting its potential valuation applications for team learning observed within the context of the production environments.

The study offers a theoretical justification, supported by empirical evidence, for employing the mathematical expression of the learning curve paradigm to rationalize the financial consequences of team learning observed within production environments.

This study attempts to formulate an ontological proposition for the intellectual capital (IC) domain. This study is motivated by the debate of contemporary thinking for different IC research streams (IC1‐ostensive versus IC2‐performative) and their different ontological perceptions for IC. The proposed ontological proposition aims to serve the epistemological requirements towards the development of a common accepted generic IC theory.

The formulation of the ontology for the IC domain is based on contemporary tools within the fields of ontology and conceptual modelling. The principal dimensions of the ontology for the IC domain are identified following the directions of the Sowa's generalised theory for ontological frameworks. For each dimension, a generic entity is defined by drawing inferences from disciplines relevant to the contemporary IC inquiry. The relationships between the generic entities are modelled with the semantic representations of General Systems Theory (GST).

This paper provides an answer to the epistemological problem of how to perceive the substance of the IC domain. The derived ontology for the IC domain recognises different IC ontological dimensions that correspond to the IC ontological assumptions of different IC research streams, attempts to associate the IC of an organization with the tangible dimension of the enterprise, and provides conceptual semantics for modelling firm‐specific IC domains under the prism of different epistemological perspectives for IC.

The proposed ontological proposition for the IC domain is an abstract ontology. It might empower researchers with guidelines for systemising the formulation of theoretical propositions and descriptions for their research fields. Yet, as an abstract ontology, it might create difficulty in its practical implementation.

The ontological proposition for the IC domain can contribute towards the debate on the establishment of a common research communicational rationalism within the IC research community for coordinating individual research efforts.