Exploring the impact of intellectual capital narratives on corporate accountability

The relevance of intellectual capital (IC) narratives in corporate reporting is well acknowledged in IC research (Mouritsen et al., 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003; Dumay and Roslender, 2013; Dumay and Rooney, 2016). The increasing diffusion of integrated reporting (IR) and IC-related report- ing frameworks, for example, the framework published by the World Intellectual Capital/Assets Initiative (WICI, 2016), may even expand the use of IC narratives to communicate the ways in which IC contributes to value creation (Abeysekera, 2013; de Villiers and Sharma, 2018). However, despite the ‘emancipatory impact’ associated with IC narratives (Dumay and Roslender, 2013), the way these narratives should be moulded to produce meaningful stories and facilitate dialogue with stakeholders has attracted limited research attention (Dumay, 2008). We fill this gap by outlining a methodological tool for testing the ability of IC narratives to address stakeholders’ accountability expectations.