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

Purpose – 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. Therefore, it compares the governmental-driven IC Statement (ICS) in Denmark with to a case of voluntary-consulting-driven adoption of IC reporting in Italy. The intend thereby is to derive policy- and managerial-relevant insights for the future instalment of internal/external reporting frameworks as successfully lasting practices. Indeed, as suggested by Norreklit et al. (2006), simply providing guidelines is not sufficient to solve the gap between theoretical knowledge and actual doing: it rather requires the integration of the four dimensions of PC to not end up in a reality-doing gap. The latter has arguably been the case of IC seen as a theory and practice respectively.