The strategic human‐capital conversion problem

Abstract Strategic human‐capital (SHC) research has explained why human capital can be strategically valuable. It has been less precise about how organizations convert human capital into value that is realized, legitimate, and appropriable. This paper leverages current discussions in SHC to develop a conversion‐centered agenda around three frontier challenges: artificial intelligence and SHC, causal attribution, and middle management. Across these domains, the same stock of human capital can produce different consequences because organizations differ in how they configure work, relationships, authority, selection, and recognition. Fruitful avenues for future research can focus on the mechanisms that mediate conversion: work design, relational infrastructure, reconfiguration, selection architecture, authority allocation, and visibility and recognition. These mechanisms shape career, legitimacy, distributional, and collective outcomes, including how surplus is divided between firms and employees. The framework grounds SHC in a matching logic while sharpening its account of value creation, value capture, and surplus distribution.