Guest editorial
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-10-2016-0106 |
| Pages | 2-8 |
| Date | 09 January 2017 |
| Published date | 09 January 2017 |
| Author | Rosa Lombardi,John Dumay |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & Finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
Guest editorial
Exploring corporate disclosure and reporting of intellectual capital (IC):
emerging innovations
Introduction
As outlined in the call for papers, the objective of this special issue is to explore corporate
disclosure of IC in light of emerging changes in technology and communication. Arguably,
the annual report has long outlived itself as the best source of corporate disclosure because
it contains backward looking information and is only a one-way means of presenting
information rather than engaging with information users. Similarly, the stand-alone IC
report is now rarely used to disclose IC information. In fact, the words “reporting”and
“disclosure”are often used synonymously, when they have different meanings. Disclosure
is: “the revelation of information that was previously secret or unknown”, while reporting is
a“detailed periodic account of a company's activities, financial condition, and prospects that
is made available to shareholders and investors”(Dumay, 2016, p. 178). Thus, investors and
stakeholders value IC disclosures, not reports. Therefore, the call for papers encouraged
emerging innovations for voluntary IC disclosure, to open up new possibilities for
presenting previously secret or unknown IC information about today’s dynamic and
intangible-based organisations.
This special issue gave researchers the opportunity to explore innovations in IC
disclosure and reporting forms and channels, such as press releases, websites, LinkedIn,
Facebook, Twitter and Google+. We were not disappointed with papers on LinkedIn (Pisano
et al., 2017), social media (Lardo et al., 2017) and prospectuses (Garanina and Dumay, 2017),
along with a critique of established frameworks such as the Balanced Scorecard
(Nielsen et al., 2017).
Additionally, we encouraged and received a paper on exploring other communication
technologies and processes that can open up a two-way discourse between the organisation
and its stakeholders (Giacosa et al., 2017). Similarly, new forms of reporting such as
integrated reporting (International Integrated Reporting Council, 2013), which include IC
and other capitals is sparking a resurging interest in IC and has inspired Garanina and
Dumay (2017) to link their study to the forward-looking arguments of integrated reporting
and Giacosa et al. (2017) to integrated ICS. We received several other good submissions,
which while they do not appear in this special issue, were at the time of writing still under
review and will possibly appear in forthcoming issues of the Journal of Intellectual Capital.
We also welcomed both theoretical work (Dumay and Guthrie, 2017) and empirical research
using quantitative (Garanina and Dumay, 2017; Whiting et al., 2017) or qualitative methods
(Schaper et al., 2017). Thus, the submissions demonstrate relevance to the understanding of
IC and corporate disclosure, through emerging innovations in disclosure and reporting.
As such we reveal what we see as being innovative about each of the papers included in the
special issue.
In presenting the papers, we have attempted to place the papers in a logical order.
In doing so, we call on the Guthrie et al. (2012) classifications of first, second and third stage
research. While Petty and Guthrie (2000) declared that the missions of creating awareness in
and creating a discourse in IC were then accomplished, we observe that a rekindling of first
stage efforts is needed to reinvigorate that discourse. Thus, we begin this special issue with
what we recognise as first stage and normative articles that include an up-to-the-minute
intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) literature review (Cuozzo et al., 2017), a theoretical paper
introducing the concept of involuntary ICD (Dumay and Guthrie, 2017) and a paper
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 18 No. 1, 2017
pp. 2-8
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-10-2016-0106
2
JIC
18,1
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