摘要：Scholars have approached to managing intangible elements from several perspectives throughout the literature. This field of research is still young, with no more than two decades of more intensive empirical research, which has confirmed the relevance of intangible-based elements on achieving a competitive edge in virtually every industry. Taxonomy and classifications of intangible elements have been built from either deductive or inductive methods. And also practitioners are more concerned and convinced tha t inta ngible elements are a key in the toda y's competition, more than ever before. However, a ca tegorization of approaches followed by scholars is still missed. The categorization proposed in this article will allow a more in-depth understanding of how intangible elements may help to achieve a competitive adva ntage, either from a theoretical or an empirical perspective. In a ddition, it will provide further information on how the different intertwined approaches relate to each other and, hence, it will help scholars and practitioners to gain a further understanding of how to implement intangible-based strategies more successfully. With these goals in mind, a search on the main databases was conducted (namely, ISI-Web of Knowl edge and Scopus). Up to 4,308 different articles dealing somehow with intangible assets were found. In this paper, the title and keywords are analyzed and the content is categorized in six different themes: Knowledge Management refers to IA and its consequences in the Knowledge cycle; Intellectual Capital refers to IAs as mainly the knowledge-based economic value, divided into Human Capital, Relational Capital and Structural Capital; Human Resource Development refers to IAs a s organizational learning; Economics deals with the micro and macroeconomic consequences of IAs and with the market of IAs; by Social Policy we mean IAs investment considered as a commodity which have social benefits and which are managed by social operators; and finally the Management and Accountability, where the quite old fashioned view is addressed according to which IAs are strategic resources that must be accounted for and valued for money. We ended with the conclusion that KM and HRD are somehow linked, as are IC, Economics and Traditional Management and Accountancy. We believe this is a first interesting indication on how society looks at the phenomenon of Intangibles. We think that this finding could help scholars and practitioners understand that in fact there are three main ways of looking at intangibles, one related with money, the second with learning and the third with power and this fact should had important consequences in the management, teaching and research of Intangibles. The study is limited because we could have used an even higher number of words to analyze each face of the Cube.
关键词：intangible a ssets; organizations; value; perspectives; intangible management
