Measuring and Intervening_ How Do We Theorise IC Management 2004

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Journal of Intellectual CapitalEmerald Article: Measuring and intervening: how do we theorisentellectual capital management?

Jan Mouritsen

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Measuring and intervening:how do we theorise intellectual

capital management?Jan Mouritsen

Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

Keywords Intellectual capital, Measurement, Management information, Asset valuation,Narratives

AbstractMeasurement of intellectual capital is important, but not only for descriptive purposes.It is important because it enables intervention. If intervention and measurement are coupled, thenmeasurement is an input rather than an output, and then measurement is not to be evaluated onits reflection of reality but rather on its ability to help actors transform their reality. This is

particularly true for intellectual capital, which is widely accepted as part of an agenda fortransformation and growth it is a strategic/political agenda. To arrive at this conclusion, thepaper discusses relationships between measurement and intervention comparing conventionalfinancial statements with intellectual capital statements.

IntroductionThere is an irony: never before has so much information been published than throughintellectual capital statements, and yet the cry for more measurement is increasinglyaired. It is widely suggested that there is a measurement problem in the field ofintellectual capital. But it is less clear what the problem is. It is not clear why merelyproviding a measure of the value of intellectual capital as indicated, e.g. in themarket-to-book value the value is already known to the capital market, why then find a

metric to measure it? So what are the reasons for measuring intellectual capital?Measurement often refers to correspondence between a phenomenon (such asintellectual capital) and its expression, so that measurement captures the value(s) orinherent dimensions of the phenomenon. The proposition is that measurement makesus certain about the phenomenon in question. Measurement helps us establish arelation between phenomenon and our perception of it. It helps us describe thephenomenon unobtrusively and with correspondence to its inherent properties. Fromthis perspective, accounting helps establish a neutral description of the firm free of bias(Mattessich, 2003; Solomons, 1991).

This is a laudable aspiration but it will not necessarily make intellectual capitalinteresting only because we have measurement systems for it in place (see, for example,Andriessen, 2003). The dilemma is that measurement may not really do what it claims to

do, because we are rarely interested in merely describing or capturing the world. We areinterested because it allows us to intervene! Does measurement create clarity? Not really,it helps us to act! Does measurement create a correspondence between the representationof the phenomenon and the phenomenon? Probably not, it is more concerned withmaking the world amenable to intervention! And does measurement create a neutraldescription of the world? No, it allows action to be performed at a distance! This is atleast the thesis of this paper: measurement of intellectual capital is interesting because itis an input that starts action rather than a conclusion that stops action. Let me argue.

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Measuring andintervening

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Journal of Intellectual Capital

Vol. 5 No. 2, 2004

pp. 257-267

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited

1469-1930

DOI 10.1108/14691930410533687


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The value of intellectual capital and the role of measurement in accountingIntellectual capital is a valued resource in the knowledge society as Drucker (1993) hastold us. He says that:

. . .

the only or at least the main producers of wealth are information and knowledge. . .

How knowledge behaves as an economic resource we do not yet fully understand. . . .We needan economic theory that puts knowledge into the centre of the wealth-producing process.

Since knowledge is ill understood, we are curious about how it links to value creation,and we struggle to specify how decisions can develop knowledge and translate thisinto desirable effects. Some research has been conducted to document relationsbetween leading and lagging indicators in areas some times very close to intellectualcapital (Ittner and Larcker, 2001; see also Bontis and Fitz-enz, 2002; Petty and Guthrie,2000), however, correlations between them are often weak. Even though it is possible toshow that on average, employee satisfaction is positively related to customer loyalty,which in turn is positively related to financial results, firms facing losses and rednumbers rarely embark on massive investments in employee training anddevelopment to create black numbers. The case is typically the opposite. Thismakes the role of measurement questionable and it does not always seem to speakloudly. The relationships between numbers and action are complex, and measurementmay not settle a debate. It is likely to start a debate, develop and push it, or redirect it innew ways. As Giddens (in Beck et al., 1994) puts it, there is no number without anarrative, implying that numbers do not speak. They have to be spoken for theyhave to be explained they have to be mobilised.

Therefore, it is not clear what we say when we refer to measurement as a solution tothe frailties of intellectual capital. It may help answering Druckers (1993) questionabout the economic theory of knowledge, but how? Intellectual capital and itsassociated reports and statements are ambiguous, but if we look at traditional financial

statement with the same critical eyes that we now use to look at intellectual capitalstatements, they are not so dissimilar in many dimensions.

First, the financial statement is also an ambiguous measurement system because itis a complex intermingling of the firms affairs with the auditing professions concerns.The strength of a financial statement is carried by accounting standards developed byprofessional bodies over time. The institutionalisation of accounting standards makesa financial statement a negotiation between the firms financial receipts and theinstitutions procedures to verify transactions. The financial statement is therefore nota pure description of the firm. It is the view of a firm through the eyes of others. Thefinancial statement is therefore not a direct representation of the firms value. Theequity is not a measure of the value of the firm to an investor. Likewise, the intellectualcapital statement does not show the value of the firm to an investor.

Second, a community of readers interprets the financial statement and it links thosewith value creation. This readership is sophisticated and has been through extensivetraining. After years in universities and business schools, years of practical training tobecome accountants, auditors, and investment analysts, only then financial statementsmake sense. Sense of financial information is not a property of the financial statementitself. It is inseparable from the way it is applied and made part of decision-makingprocesses. The huge process of interpretation is evidence that there is a loose couplingbetween the financial statement and its message. And therefore, there may be many

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possible storylines to be detected in a financial statement, but always based on theefforts performed by readers to make sense. The information value of a financialstatement is thus also a negotiation just like the production of the financial statementthrough accounting standards. This concern to understand (Johanson, 2003) is

important for intellectual capital because hardly anyone has been trained in readingintellectual capital statements yet. It is not surprising that there is some confusionabout their significance.

Third, the financial statement is loosely coupled to the firms value. The equity israrely an indication of the firms value to an investor, and in many cases it is onlyloosely related to the auditors judgment of the firm. There is more to the firmsfinancial well being than the financial results. Just like the intellectual capital statementdoes not tell the whole story of the firms knowledge resources.

When comparing conventional financial statements with intellectual capitalstatements, one observation is presenting itself again and again: the major difference isthat we have grown accustomed to reading the financial statement in spite of all its

deficiencies. We have created institutions that can read them and make some kind ofinformed or at least justifiable decisions on their basis. This suggests thatmeasurement of the values described in financial statements is a fragile process andthat it somehow and to a certain degree shares these properties with intellectual capitalstatements. So, measurement problems are basic not only to intellectual capital butalso to financial capital more generally.

Intellectual capital statement as managerial technologyAn intellectual capital statement has parallel characteristics to financial statementsand it is therefore, in principle, equally good for purposes of management or

intervention either through the management of the firm or the decisions made in thecapital market. An intellectual capital statement creates knowledge about howknowledge is created, developed and applied in the firm (Bontis, 2002; Edvinsson andMalone, 1997; Sveiby, 1997). It summarises the firms efforts to develop and useknowledge resources. The intellectual capital statement creates distance to theon-going affairs of the firm, and in this way it facilitates evaluation. Presenting thecomposition, upgrade and use of knowledge resources over time (Mouritsen et al., 2002)the intellectual capital statement puts forwards evaluative questions: Do we like it?Where should it be changed? Can we agree on new measures? Such questions aremanagerial ones because they help managers to change knowledge resources anddirect them towards new strategies. As a managerial technology, intellectual capitalstatements can do the following:

. Capture the on-going affairs of the business and transport them to a localitywhere they can be debated and assessed independently of the day-to-dayconcerns of operations.

. Establish a distanced perspective on the myriad of actions that go on all the timeto use and qualify knowledge.

. Induce evaluative and normative reflection by assessing knowledgemanagement activities.


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. Allow decision making because there is time to contemplate on the future ofknowledge resources. And then such decisions are implemented and the resultswill turn up in a subsequent intellectual capital statement.

In principle, the intellectual capital statement facilitates intervention, either from theperspective of internal readers or from external ones. Knowledge about thedevelopment and application of the firms knowledge resources is integral to themobilisation of a systematic kind of knowledge management. Here, the interest inintervention is stronger than in representation. Or, alternatively, the interest inintervention drives interest in measurement in the sense that good measurementallows intervention to occur. This type of argument persuades Latour (1993) to saythat:

. . . the problem of correspondence becomes crucial only for those who want to act at adistance. If you are not at a distance, or do not wish to act upon other settings, the notion ofcorrespondence vanishes, and so does the problem of the referent.

To act at a distance means acting to influence others, and therefore, measurement (toestablish correspondence) is interesting if it influences others.Measurement is connected to power. This is not happenstance because one key

feature of the knowledge society is to make phenomena discussable and transformable.It is characteristic that:

. . .the reflexivity of modern social life [is] that social practices are constantly examined andreformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutivelyaltering their character (Giddens, 1990).

Consequently, in modern life, information about it is used to alter it. It transformspractices. Therefore, when we consider intellectual capital measurement it is useful tolook not only at its descriptive qualities, but also at its performative qualities.

Therefore, it is useful to consider whether value is an outcome of measurement orwhether measurement is an input to value creation. Do we measure value or do weproduce value through measurement?

Measuring value or processes of valuing?It is well known that intellectual capital can be used to complement financial value toarrive at the market value of the firm (e.g. Edvinsson and Malone, 1997). The firmsmarket value is the sum of financial and intellectual capital and the value is the sum ofrecognised conventional assets, recognised intangibles, and non-recognisedcompetencies. But what is value. Is it a noun; or is it a verb? It could be both.

In conventional accounting values are manipulations of values of transactionalreceipts. It is a mathematical construct organised via disciplined and rule-based

manipulations of business transactions that make up book values by assigning entriesas expenses or assets; or as liabilities, revenues or capital. This is measurement when itis the strongest: all the referents are historical and part of the general ledger. It willhardly fill the gap between market and accounting book values of the company,however, because it does not consider the future. But it is reliable and reproducible.

The finance perspective focuses on net present value of cash flows. Here value isjustified from cash flow projections (Lev and Radhakrishnan, 2003). Compared with themeasurement tradition of conventional accounting, which focuses on the balance sheet,

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the finance view has to assume the future to arrive at a measurement of value. It doesthis by assuming stability in the P&L statements numbers. This is useful for certainpurposes but not for all.

Both the conventional accounting and the finance perspectives are concerned with

describing a set value of the firms intellectual assets that it wishes to unearth from thehidings within the measures themselves. Intellectual capital statements are moreconcerned in value as a verb less about a value than to value what is done to makethings valuable. Intellectual capital management is a process of value creation, and itmakes little sense to say that the future is a set function of the past, because asknowledge grows in firms, new opportunities surface all the time and therefore it isimpossible to arrive at one finite and set value of intellectual capital. In contrast,intellectual capital is a process of discovery and development (Roos et al., 1997). Here,value does not (only) imply calculating a value, but to understand the creation anddevelopment of value (Bukh, 2003; Hussi and Ahonen, 2002; Guthrie, 2001; Mouritsenet al., 2002; Petty and Guthrie, 2000).

Measurement as objectHow is measurement accomplished? This process of committing items to the balancesheet is a process of disentanglement, where a separation between entities isconstructed, and where the phenomenon in question is established (Callon, 1998). Theentities are made visible by a procedure of inscription through which they are maderecognisable and represented by names and numbers on paper. This is what happenswhen accounting transactions are added, subtracted, divided and multiplied with eachother. To recognise assets is to show how they are separate from other assets, andtherefore the process of disentanglement is one where the asset is taken away fromthe sphere of the firms production process where it in use is complementary to otherassets. To take items away is therefore a transformation of the item because it is

described not in action but on hold. Via, for example, International AccountingStandards, assets can be identified and disentangled from the firms productionfunction. This form of measurement is an institutional game. It is defined as muchoutside the firm as inside. The receipts are internal, but they have to pass externallegitimation before they can be justified to reflect the firm. However, this also meansthat there is no direct relationship between the accounting assets and its organisationalbasis. They are loosely coupled, and their relevance depends on how much anaccounting asset can be mobilised to reflect other things in the firm. It is a translationbetween realms of knowledge rather than a direct representation of the firm, and theaccounting statement is interesting for its information value rather than its absolutevalues. It is related to other phenomena, and there may be many ways to do this. We donot really know how such linkages are made only, that they exist.

This view of measurement sees it as a mechanism to bring closure. Through rulesand standards it attempts to freeze assets and put them on hold. By disentangling themfrom each other, measurement crafts assets and communicates them via the balancesheet and the P&L statement. The assets have been laid to rest, and the relationsbetween them have been silenced.

There may be another option. Measurement could be about assets in action. Here,the interest is the relationship between various kinds of assets or resources, which evenif they, in some form, may be individually calculable are interesting only for collective


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performance (Lev and Radhakrishnan, 2003). Such assets which are more in line withthe logic of intellectual capital do not easily conform to the requirements of anexternal rule setting institution, but have to be related more systematically to theidiosyncratic principles of value creation that can be found in the specific firm. Here,

each asset functions in connection with other assets. They are bound to the place wherethey are put to use, and not the capital market. Also managers, may have difficulties inseeing how they work or indeed seeing them at all. This is why for this type ofentangled resource there is some kind of need to separate them, because otherwisethey cannot be made manageable. To manage a certain extent level of disentanglementis necessary. So, there is a need to look at the collective work of entangled resourcesand assets, but to do this, some form of disentanglement is necessary. But which one?

The object to be measuredA problem with knowledge is that it does not have an object. It is not possible just toknow! One has to know about something! Knowledge is not an object but more an

aspiration to be insightful, to develop ones appreciation of the problems at hand, andto be reflexive about the world. Knowledge is not a solution in knowledge society. It isa problem! Giddens (1990) says this clearly in his analysis of reflexivity in the modernworld:

What is characteristic of modernity is not an embracing of the new for its own sake, but thepresumption of wholesale reflexivity which includes reflection on the nature of reflectionitself.

He insists that knowledge is not knowledge in the old sense where to know is to becertain. In contrast, knowledge is never adequate; it is never reached; and it canalways grow. Knowledge produces its own demise, because it is used to questionknowledge. This is how knowledge society is reflexive. The great philosopher Karl

Popper (1972) stated forcefully, that the future of social and organisational systemscannot be predicted, because the growth of knowledge will itself impact on the future ofsuch systems. And the growth of knowledge cannot be predicted because knowledge isused to develop new knowledge in ingenious ways.

But how can we manage knowledge if the effects of knowledge are not readilypredictable? Knowledge management, as conceived through intellectual capital, is notabout precise prediction of items of knowledge but about orienting the production ofknowledge towards a purpose (Mouritsen and Larsen, forthcoming). This is why acentral component of knowledge management is to develop the object that the firm hasto know about. This object is not a thing but an aspiration to be good at something. Inintellectual capital statements this something is often the difference that knowledgemakes for somebody or something. Knowledge is productive when it can make a

difference, and therefore it is no random occurrence that in intellectual capitalstatements there is typically a great deal of emphasis on explaining how the firmdirects its knowledge towards purposes that involve being able to make a difference toa user. As consequence the object of knowledge is to make a difference to somebody orsomething. In this way knowledge gets directed, and it is possible to know not onlythat the firm has to know, but to know what it has to know something about.

This is a very classical proposition. Socrates and Theaetetus developed this in theirinterchange about knowledge:

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SOCRATES: [. . .] When you speak of cobbling, you mean by that word precisely a knowledgeof shoemaking?THEAETETUS: Precisely.SOCRATES: And when you speak of carpentry, you mean just a knowledge of how to make

wooden furniture?THEAETETUS: Yes.SOCRATES: In both cases, then, you are defining what the craft is a knowledge of?THEAETETUS: Yes.SOCRATES: But the question you were asked [. . .] was not, what are the objects ofknowledge, nor yet how many sorts of knowledge there are. We did not want to count them,but to find out what the thing itself knowledge is.

It is difficult to see knowledge independently of what it is to accomplish, Socrates says.And this is why it has to be related to a purpose, which says something about theeffects of knowledge. Some purposes do not do this. Expected market share andprofitability do not do this. But ambitions to create teaching activities independently oftime and space in some schools, and propositions to create quality of life in some

medical firms, and ideas of securing personal growth in some consulting firmssomehow do (Mouritsen et al., 2002). Even if sometimes worded pathetically, suchclaims suggest something about the way knowledge has to perform and it is beingproblematised against effects that are oriented toward the users of the firms productsand services rather than merely its financial results. These are related, obviously, butnot necessarily narrowly in time and space (see also Bukh, 2003, Hussi and Ahonen,2002).

Systematic knowledge management thus requires the firm to direct its knowledgeresources towards an object; an object whose justification can be found in the characterof the service it provides. Users are thus inherently interesting for systematicknowledge management. And if the development of knowledge resources is surveyedthrough the intellectual capital statement, then itsraison detreis justified by its ability

to perform; by its competence; by the difference it makes to something or somebody.

Theorising measurement and intellectual capital statementsIntellectual capital statements reflect on a firms process of developing, sharing andmaintaining its knowledge base. It assigns purposes to this process and surveys itsaccomplishments through series of numbers. The intellectual capital statement showsthe firms efforts to monitor, to qualify and to orchestrate its knowledge resources. It isaimed at persuading an internal or external audience that it develops it knowledgeresources so as to develop the relationships between knowledge resources and thefirms aspirations to be innovative, flexible and customer-oriented.

For some, such a story line is not easily acceptable and therefore there is a cry formore measurement and perhaps accountability. However, as the discussion presentedabove suggests, it is not measurement as such that is in demand; it is the provision ofexplanation. And this explanation has to be about how entanglement occurs and isproductive. What we see here is that relations in intellectual capital and associatedintellectual capital statements have to be drawn up. One fruitful kind of theorising orlines of explanation is to see the intellectual capital statement as the space forintellectual capital and suggest that only here is intellectual capital possible. What isthen outside intellectual capital? There would be all sorts of transactions that we enrolinto an explanation that we call intellectual capital. Just as profits in the financial


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statement is only there on the paper, intellectual capital may just be there on the paper.Profits, after all, are the result of all kinds of valuation processes and it cannot bedirectly seen if the financial statement were not in place. So, perhaps intellectual capitalonly exists on the paper and the relation to practices has to be pointed out. How do such

practices get pointed out? Either they do not because by and large, we already knowthem. This is the case of the financial accounting statement. We know, for example,which industry a particular firm belongs to and thus also its primary technology,markets and competition. We have prior knowledge. Or the practices have to beoutlined on the paper. This is what intellectual capital statements do. They show howfor some firms, intellectual capital is a story line that explains or proposes howvarious sorts of activities can be attached to the movement of intellectual capital andthus all the disparate singular events that can be seen in practices are integrated witheach and put into a large storyline about the functioning of intellectual capital andabout how management look towards it to upgrade it and monitor its effects.

Then it is suddenly clear, that narratives and numbers are related. They are

inseparable because they help to constitute each other. Narratives of achievement, e.g.in the production of quality of life for some people, or flexible education and trainingetc. can suddenly be integrated with small efforts to develop training, IT andcustomer relations. It is by putting narrative, efforts, indicators, pictures and ambitiontogether that suddenly it becomes clear what kind of knowledge resource is interestingto firms (Mouritsenet al., 2002). Then the world is inscribed on paper. It is pulled in andmade evaluate-able. And by combining and recombining the elements of theintellectual capital statement itself, it can actually change and transform peoples ideasabout what happens in the firm. Sometimes the intellectual capital statement changesthe firm in the eyes even of management. It is interesting to note Latours (1993) pointabout such paper work:

All these inscriptions can be superimposed, reshuffled, recombined, and summarized, andtotally new phenomena emerge, hidden from the other people from whom these inscriptionshave been extracted.

Here, what Latour (1993) says is that paperwork (inscriptions) is highly flexible. It ispossible to add, subtract, multiply or divide numbers and new phenomena will emerge.It is possible to integrate indicators with efforts and narratives and suddenly get a newversion of what intellectual capital is and is doing in the firm. It is noteworthy thatsuch accomplishments will not emanate from practices as such. They will have to bemotivated somewhere. They require reflexivity and therefore they require some notionthat the present could be different from the future. For this to happen, the flexibility oflearning from inscriptions all the things that are already available on the paper thatconstitute the intellectual capital statement it is possible to redefine the world. It is a

potentiality. It may not always happen, but the prospect is central to how we see suchthings as intellectual capital that, in principle, is said to develop firms.

If this perspective is granted some value, we have to be concerned not to take tooliterally the proposition that we now have to test theories rather than develop theoriesof intellectual capital as it has been argued in the useful and excellent paper by, forexample, Marret al.(2003). They are frustrated by the many perspectives that operatein the field of intellectual capital. This is an understandable frustration, but perhapsthe problem is that it is not yet so clear how a theory should look like. Marret al.(2003)

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pay attention to the various approaches developed throughout the 1990s to understandcapabilities and to establish correlations between indicators. However, both accountsare, in my mind, elements of something else. A lot of the literature on, for example,resources and capabilities provides narratives rather than testable propositions. Not

only resources and capabilities but also concerns about quality customer orientation,business excellence, flexibility and other words that one cannot be against, arecompletely derived of content. They can be used for almost anything in firms, andtherefore they are typically provisional propositions that may turn into narratives butnot until they have been equipped with business models (management challenges),effort and indicators, and possibly even pictures and illustrations. It is this wholenetwork of concepts that will determine what such words mean.

The other part of Marr et al.s (2003) review is the concern with measurementindicating the need to document the effects of intellectual capital in various areas. Thisis an important aspect of the debate about intellectual capital, and it is important totease out the correlations we can find. But should we assume that indicators have aone-to-one relationship with discernible organisational practices? Probably not, and

this makes the intermingling of indicators with efforts, business models, narrativesand the like a central point of the analysis. So, in this optic, measurement is separatedfrom what it is about. This is a bit strange.

Therefore, it may be, as Marret al.(2003) suggest, that there are few generalised ortested hypotheses. But perhaps this is the lesson. We should not find them, because weshould look at how the two dimensions of their paper fit together. How content- freeconcepts like competencies and resources (and even strategy and mission) andindicators are related. By splitting these elements, perhaps the untangling has been toothorough. At least, it is possible to go the other way and consider them one thing acompletely entangled phenomenon so that it is possible to look at how narratives ofcompetence and resource get established and prolonged. I am fairly convinced that

measurement is an input to this rather than an output. And this may be the theory ofintellectual capital: IC is the intermingling of words and practices and indicators,mobilised to (if stated optimistically) reflexively develop the ability of an entity to dosomething for others; or (if formulated less optimistically) to develop white collarproductivity.

ConclusionMeasurement is important for intellectual capital but not only for the conventionalreasons. It is not primarily interesting for its ability to capture the essence of theintellectual business. It is also interesting for its ability to perform as an input toreflexivity through which things can be changed and mobilised. Measurement is notonly a conclusion; it is the beginning.

This fits well with a theory of intellectual capital oriented towards construction construction of relations between disparate elements of action around intellectualresources. Such a theory would suggest that the intellectual capital statement is itselfan arena for developing intellectual capital rather than mapping it. Through such anagenda it is possible to develop an appreciation of how the individual activities andefforts performed in the name of knowledge can be associated with strategies, businessmodels and indicators. The statement itself is an activity that makes intellectual capitalreal for the firm. And this is how we can see intellectual capital, as an integrative


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devise where the future is constructed, and made an asset, as Leif Edvinsson wouldinsist (Mouritsen et al., 2001).

Measurement is not separate from the activities they refer to but inherently part ofan ongoing problematisation of the firms activities. It may help generate a stand

against where new questions can be asked, and new courses of action can be devised.Here the purposes of intellectual capital are drawn forward and it is assumed thatnumbers cannot say this by themselves. This is why some attention to the purpose ofmeasurement is relevant. This relevance comes in two steps. One type of relevance iswhat typically can be read from accounting type statements such as concerns about thecomposition of assets and liabilities; the concerns about investment and upgrades andthe concerns about effects. This allows a distanciated view of intellectual capital even ifit is structured according to certain generalised interests. This allows oneinterpretation of intellectual capital. The second step is to understand the firmsknowledge strategy and its implementation. This requires a slightly more situatedaccount of the firms intellectual resources and links between strategy, business model,activities, and indicators.

Together they form a perspective on the firms intellectual capital and they make itvisible a visibility which is not, however, the end of the story but its beginning; itspossible transformation.

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Mouritsen, J., Bukh, P.D., Larsen, H.T. and Johansen, M.R. (2002), Developing and managingknowledge through intellectual capital statements,Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 3No. 1, pp. 10-29.

Petty, R. and Guthrie, J. (2000), Intellectual capital literature review: measurement, reporting andmanagement, Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 155-76.

Popper, K. (1972), Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Roos, G., Ross, G., Edvinsson, L. and Dragonetti, N.C. (1997), Intellectual Capital: Navigating inthe New Business Landscape, Macmillan Business, Houndsmills.

Solomons, D. (1991), Accounting and social change: a neutralist view, Accounting,Organizations and Society, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 287-95.

Sveiby, K. (1997), The New Organizational Wealth: Managing and Measuring Knowledge-basedAssets, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, CA.

Further reading

Mouritsen, J., Larsen, H.T. and Bukh, P.N. (2001), Reading intellectual capital statements:describing and prescribing knowledge management strategies, Journal of IntellectualCapital, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 359-83.


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