The Actor’s Role in the Survival of non-financial Management and Reporting Practices: the case of IC reporting in Denmark and Italy

Abstract

According to Chaminade and Roberts (2003, p. 733) "(…) a dominant accounting perspective can lead to an excessive focus on measurement issues and little attention to management processes (of implementing Intellectual Capital in organizations)". By applying a pragmatic constructivist (PC) perspective, this paper intends to shed a different light on the demise of Intellectual Capital (IC) reporting by focusing on the role of the involved actors and how they construct reality. Therefore, it compares the government-driven IC Statement (ICS) in Denmark (Nielsen et al., 2017;Schaper 2016) with the case of voluntary consulting-driven adoption of IC reporting in Italy (Chiucchi and Giuliani, 2017;Giuliani and Chiucchi, 2018). The intent thereby is to derive policy-and managerial-relevant insights for the future installment of internal/external reporting frameworks as successfully lasting practices. Indeed, as suggested by Nørreklit et al. (2006), merely providing guidelines is not sufficient to solve the gap between theoretical knowledge and actual doing: it instead requires the integration of the four dimensions of PC to not end up in a realitydoing gap. The latter has arguably been the case of IC seen as a theory and practice respectively.