Intellectual capital disclosure: a structured literature review
| Published date | 09 January 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-10-2016-0104 |
| Pages | 9-28 |
| Date | 09 January 2017 |
| Author | Benedetta Cuozzo,John Dumay,Matteo Palmaccio,Rosa Lombardi |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & Finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
Intellectual capital disclosure:
a structured literature review
Benedetta Cuozzo
Department of Economics and Law,
Universita degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, Cassino, Italy
John Dumay
Department of Accounting and Corporate Governance,
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Matteo Palmaccio
Department of Economics and Law,
Universita degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, Cassino, Italy, and
Rosa Lombardi
Department of Law and Economics of Productive Activities,
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paperis to provide an up-to-the-minute literaturereview of intellectual capital
disclosure(ICD) to: identify the majorthemes developed withinthis research stream; investigatethe evolution of
the theory; and derive insights to guidefuture research agendas for the benefitof researchers and ICD users.
Design/methodology/approach –Research articles from ten relevant journals for the 17-year period
between 2000 and 2017 are categorised and analysed in a structured literature review (Massaro et al., 2016) to
answer these three research questions. This study adds to a data set established by Guthrie et al. (2012) and
presents the results in a consistent and comparable manner across the studies.
Findings –A lack of significant innovation in the evolution of ICD indicates that this research stream may
have been a victim of its own success (Dumay and Guthrie, 2017). Stuck in overview mode, studies continue to
fixate on general issues, largely drawing their analysis from the corporate reports of publicly listed companies
in Europe. Very few studies examine ICD in the USA and beyond, nor do they drill down to organisational
level to examine ICD in practice.
Practical implications –We academics need to leave our ivory towers and base future research on how
organisations, in different contexts, using different languages, harness intangible assets to create value.
Without discouraging content analysis from corporate reports, we need to be more innovative in searching for
IC from the rich variety of media resources modern corporate communication channels offer, and recognise
that, while we are all working towards the same thing, we may not be using the same language to get there.
Originality/value –Despite extending previous work, this study highlights some of the new insights
revealed from ICD research, especially over the last two years. The findings regarding differing use of
terminology across continents, a general decline in published research due to lack of interest or new ground to
cover, and zero evidence for a “groundswell”of IC disclosures by listed companies should motivate further
reading in many researchers.
Keywords IC research, Intellectual capital disclosure, Structured literature review
Paper type Research paper
1. The importance of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD)
The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the field of ICD as part of this special
issue. A literature review is important for this special issue because it sets the scene from the
perspective of past research, maps the evolution of the major research themes, and thus
helps to identify the gaps available for future research.
This review adds to and analyses a data set of papers, first established by Guthrie et al.
(2012) and improved by Dumay and Garanina (2013), Dumay (2014a), and Dumay and
Cai (2014, 2015), that contains 17 years of ICD research between 2000 and this special issue
from the field’s most substantive IC journals. Hence, this paper represents the most up to
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 18 No. 1, 2017
pp. 9-28
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-10-2016-0104
Received 13 October 2016
Accepted 14 October 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1469-1930.htm
9
Intellectual
capital
disclosure
date review of ICD research possible and allows us to derive insights into, critique and make
recommendations towards the future ICD research.
We examine the foundations of ICD research to understand intellectual capital theory,
which has increased in its importance in the fields of economics and management over the
last two decades (Guthrie et al., 1999; Guthrie and Petty, 2000; Dumay and Garanina, 2013).
According to Dumay (2012), intellectual capital theory has two grand foundations –the
difference between market-to-book values (Mouritsen et al., 2001a) and the disclosure of
intellectual capital as a means to greater profitability through a lower cost of capital
(Bismuth and Tojo, 2008). Considering this review concentrates on ICD, this literature
review mainly addresses the latter theory.
In the light of the emerging changes in technology and communication available today, a
structured literature review (SLR) may reveal the impact these new avenues of disclosure have
had on organisations. Arguably, the annual report has long outlived itself as the best source of
corporate disclosure. It is both backward-looking and a one-way means of communication –two
significant failings in today’s forward-focussed and interactive discourse mediums (Dumay,
2016). Similarly, stand-alone IC reports are rarely used to disclose IC information (Dumay, 2016,
p. 176). Thus, there is a need to go beyond IC reporting (Edvinsson, 2013, p. 163).
Emerging innovations in ICD, such as integrating reporting, disclosure in ecosystems,
stakeholder engagement open up new possibilities for future research. As does how to
update and reapply existing approaches to today’s dynamic, knowledge driven, intangible-
based organisations (Dumay, 2016, p. 178), where comparability across companies, moving
beyond a Euro-centric view of IC, or helping investors find the right needles in the haystack
of their information overload are key.
Understanding what we have learned and how it has changed society helps direct future
research for its most important benefactors, the users. To this end, our paper asks and
answers three interrelated research questions (Massaro et al., 2016):
RQ1. What are the major themes that have been developed within ICD research?
RQ2. What is the focus and critique of ICD research?
RQ3. What is the future of ICD research?
The paper has three further sections. The methodology section outlines how we selected the
articles for analysis and how we developed and applied the analytical framework.
The results and discussion section answer the first two research questions through
descriptive statistics and a critique of the results. Our views on the future of ICD research,
some closing remarks, and the limitations of our paper are provided in the final section.
2. Methodology
This section explains the methods for selecting and reviewing the papers examined in this study.
The methodology is similar to other recent reviews in intellectual capital and accounting
literature, and follows Massaro et al. (2016) SLR methodology. It builds on a data set used in
prior reviews beginning with Guthrie et al. (2012). Including the articles discovered in this
paper, the data set now includes ICD studies from the relevant literature for the 17-year
period from 2000 to this special issue.
The steps taken to assemble the data set before presenting the results and discussion are
outlined in the following. In identifying the journals for this review, the authors chose to use
the same journals examined in Guthrie et al. (2012) to ensure comparability of results, and
because these journals publish interdisciplinary accounting research, including IC, and are
generallyavailable to scholars throughresearch databases (Guthrieand Murthy, 2009, p. 129).
No new or additional journals meeting this criteria were identified. Thus, this review
incorporatestwo specialist journals –the Journalof Intellectual Capital (JIC) and theJournal of
10
JIC
18,1
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