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The purpose of this paper is to present a structured literature review of the public sector intellectual capital (IC) literature. It is, in part, motivated by a recent review of the IC literature by Guthrie et al. (2012, p. 74), who found that the public sector is one of the least addressed areas of IC research.

This paper presents a structured literature review of public sector IC articles that is as up to date as possible. The authors use and update the dataset from Guthrie et al. (2012) to include another five plus years of data, including seven articles appearing in this special issue.

The public sector IC has a primary research focus on central government and central government agencies, education (especially universities), Europe (especially Italy and Spain) and empirical research using case studies mainly investigating management control and strategy. It appears public sector IC researchers are firmly entrenched in performative third-stage research, investigating “how” IC works in organisations rather than offering normative solutions.

Three areas offered as a way of forwarding public sector IC research. First, there is a need to expand public sector IC research from beyond the confines of education (university) research. There is also an opportunity for a study to synthesise the findings. Second, there is also a need for more longitudinal research in public sector IC because IC is not an event, but a journey. Third, there is an opportunity for researchers to undertake empirical research with organisations to develop and test IC frameworks and models in specific public sector contexts.

The authors call for researchers to consider helping public sector practitioners implement IC frameworks and models through interventionist research. In keeping with the performative third-stage IC research agenda, interventionist research makes it possible for academic researchers to act as a catalyst for implementing IC frameworks and models in practice.

This paper is a must read for IC researchers wanting to embark on public sector research. The paper outlines how public sector IC research has developed, offers critique and outlines future opportunities for research that has potential impact, rather than concentrating on already well-researched contexts.

The paper identifies the types of risks disclosed by Italian organisations using integrated reporting (IR). This paper aims to understand the level and features of risk disclosure with the adoption of IR.

The authors use risk classifications already provided in the literature to develop a content analysis of Italian organisations’ integrated reports published.

The content analysis reveals that most of the Italian organisations incorporate many types of risk disclosure into their integrated reports. Organisations use this alternative form of reporting to communicate risk differently from how they disclose risks in traditional annual financial reporting. That is, the study finds that the organisations use their integrated reports to disclose a broader group of risks, related to the environment and society, and do so using narrative and visual representation.

The paper contributes to a narrow stream of research investigating risk disclosure provided through IR, contributing to the understanding of the role of IR in representing an organisational risk.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the articles presented in this special issue. The Special Issue is inspired by our recent review of the intellectual capital (IC) literature in Guthrie et al. (2012, p. 74), in which the authors found that the public sector is one of the least addressed areas of IC research.

The paper is based on a literature and published document review, experiential reflections and argument.

The paper reveals that interest in public sector and IC is alive and well and the major difference between public sector and mainstream IC research is a complete lack of normative research. The papers in this Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) Special Issue continue that tradition.

The authors call on public sector IC researchers to continue the third stage and fourth stage IC research tradition encouraging them to explore emerging issues alongside the changes in the social, political and economic realities impacting public sector IC in the future. Doing so will ensure that public sector IC research is timely, relevant, impactful and contributes to future practice, research, policy and above all, benefits the citizens who need and consume public services.

The paper presents a précise of current public sector research and encourages public sector researchers to continue developing research into how IC works.

This paper aims to explore the nature of voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) disclosure by non-GHG-registered companies among industry sectors over a period after the introduction of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Act 2007 and before the introduction of the Australian ETS.

A GHG disclosure index is used to evaluate the levels of GHG disclosure in 2009 and 2011 annual reports.

This paper highlights that non-GHG-registered companies seem to improve their disclosure by incorporating more “behavioural management” actions rather than “symbolic” actions. The changing rationale of GHG disclosure is towards more serious GHG reduction strategies. Consistent with voluntary disclosure and signalling theories, companies having good news to tell disclose their superior GHG information to promote their superior environmental performance.

The findings should be useful for stakeholders who are interested in GHG disclosure strategies. Also, the content analysis of the annual reports provides some clarity in respect of the most common aspects of GHG disclosure by non-GHG-registered companies which is helpful in the evaluation of correspondence between carbon disclosure strategies and the objectives of carbon abatement.

Previous studies mostly investigate the differences in the type of GHG disclosure among companies subject to mandatory GHG regulations. However, this paper is the first study to examine the changing rationale in the nature of GHG disclosure of non-GHG-registered companies. While much of the prior research uses GHG-registered companies as the sample, no empirical study to date has considered non-GHG-registered companies that encompass 96 per cent of ASX listed companies.

This paper presents a reflection in memory and tribute to the work and life of Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948–2024).

We invited those colleagues whom we knew to be close to Barbara to submit reflections about her contributions to academia alongside their memories of her as a person. We present these reflections in the order we received them, and they have only been edited for minor grammatical and punctuation issues to preserve the voice of the contributing authors.

The reflections in this paper represent different translations of Barbara’s academic and theoretical contributions. However, she also contributed to people. While we can count the number of papers, books and book chapters she published, we must also count the number of co-authors, Ph.D. supervisions, visiting professorships and conference plenaries she touched. This (ac)counting tells the story of Barbara reaching out to work and interact with people, especially students and early career researchers. She touched their lives, and the publications are an artefact of a human being, not an academic stuck in an ivory tower.

A paper in Barbara Czarniawska’s honour where some of her closest colleagues can leave translations of her work through a narrative reflection, seems to be a fitting tribute.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an up-to-the-minute literature review of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) to: identify the major themes developed within this research stream; investigate the evolution of the theory; and derive insights to guide future research agendas for the benefit of researchers and ICD users.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comment on the contribution of the Environmental performance accountability special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal published in 1997 towards the innovation through a personal reflection developed from the perceived need to move academics and practitioners into the same space on environmental improvement by organisations. In addition, the paper will offer future directions for environmental performance accountability research, including the potential for tools such as integrated reporting, the need for theoretical pragmatism and importance of a transdisciplinary approach to research.

The diegetic method used for this article allowed for the provision of a narrative about actions, characters and events of interest to an audience. This method facilitated the intersection between the biographical and the historical content and context, and a hypodiegesis provided the ability for an embedded story within the larger history. The approach allowed for a hypodiegetic as the story within the story of developing the relationships between academic accountants and practitioners.

Contained in the special issue is a set of articles marking the extremes of academic and practitioner perspectives on what is broadly termed environmental performance and accountability. Review of the content of the special issue reveals that the bias is towards academic rather than practitioner appreciation. Review of the context providing the setting for the special issue shows the need for publishers to engage in the social media mechanisms needed to commence dialogue and convey the messages of academics to practitioners.

Subjective assessment is overtly recognized rather than subsumed in the research methods adopted.

The embedding of articles in special issues within a broader communications portfolio for practitioner understanding is suggested.

The nature of the personal reflection means that thoughts recorded are novel and unique.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an action research project carried out in an Italian university hospital that was facing a strategic challenge. The role of intellectual capital (IC) for university hospital strategic management is discussed after developing and applying an IC framework to enhance the visualisation of strategic IC elements.

An action research process has been applied in the studied setting based on Susman and Evered’s (1978) definition of the engaged research cycle.

The action research process allowed a gap between theory and practice to be bridged; the strategic control process resulted supported by new measures; a different approach to strategy management was launched, and other organisations perceived the relevance of the IC representation and wished to import it.

Research limitations are related to those recognised for the interventionist research approach.

The paper contributes to the improvement of managerial and accounting technologies for practitioners managing university hospitals and discusses a university hospital’s strategic goals.

The paper represents a methodological contribution related to the interventionist research stream of literature, and enriches the limited studies focused on IC in health care organisations. Furthermore, the paper enables appreciation of the role of academics in the convergence of theory and practice.

The public sector is one of the least addressed areas of intellectual capital (IC) research. Universities are an interesting area of investigation because they are considered critical players in the knowledge-based society. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general, flexible and comprehensive “IC Maturity Model” for Universities (ICMM), a framework for defining and implementing IC measurement and management approaches, as part of the whole strategic management of universities. Thus, the ICMM proposes a staged framework to initiate a step-by-step change within a university based upon its current level of IC management maturity. The different steps of maturity might be an answer to cope with the huge diversity of European universities, some of which have strong managerial orientation, while others follow collegial forms of governance.

The research approach is based on what has been called the “third stage” of IC research (Dumay and Garanina, 2013), focused on the practices of IC approaches rather than on its theoretical conceptualisation. The ICMM has been developed under the “Quality Assurance in Higher Education through Habilitation and Auditing” project framework, initiated by the Executive Agency for Higher Education and Research Funding of Romania (EUFISCDI). Three Mutual Learning Workshops (MLWs) were organised as a mean to bring together 15 international experts and practitioners to share their views and experience on IC reporting and setting up task forces.

An ICMM, which is a flexible model of implementing IC approaches within public universities, is developed. The ICMM provides a theoretical continuum along which the process of maturity can be developed incrementally from one level to the next, moving from IC data collection, awareness of IC, adjustment of IC specific indicators, measurement of IC, reporting of IC, interpretation and decision making, strategy and planning.

Future research needs to conduct empirical studies in universities to generalise the effectiveness of the ICMM model and guidelines for implementation.

The ICMM provides a staged framework to initiate a step-by-step change within a university based upon its current level of IC management maturity and its IC value creation dynamics. It allows universities to follow different paths, not necessarily a linear sequence.

Although several methods for IC measurement and management exist, most of these cannot accommodate the trade-off between the comparability aims and the efforts to capture the institution’s uniqueness when designing an IC model.