Proceedings

this capital, which contains non-financial and related information, is the basic value
for a company (Amir & Lev, 1996; Edvinsson & Malone, 1997; Stewart, 1997;
Bontis, 1999, 2001, Ittner, 2008). They claim that intellectual capital supports entities
in creating value and offers competitive advantages. Therefore, intellectual capital can
be considered as one of the most valuable „assets” and the most competitive “weapon” in
business.
Consequently, the fundamental objective of this paper is to create an accurate image
of what intellectual capital represents from the angle of accounting researches. In
order to achieve this objective, we perform a content analysis of the annual reports
from entities listed on the Romanian capital market.
1. PRIOR RESEARCH AND BACKGROUND
The annual reports prepared and published by the entities listed on the capital market
have been used to investigate the practice of reporting information on intellectual
capital (Brennan, 2001; Guthrie et al., 1999, 2006) and the content analysis of the
annual statements having been used by various researchers, because it represents a
good instrument for a comparative assessment of positions and trends used in
preparing the statements.
Australian researchers have been amongst the first to adopt the content analysis as a
means to examine the practices used by entities to manage and prepare the statements
on intellectual capital. Guthrie and Petty (2000), by referring to the Australian annual
reporting practices, focus on intellectual capital utilized by the largest 19 entities, on
market capitalization. They use the method of content analysis and a modified version
of Sveiby’s model in order to classify information on intellectual capital. The three
dimensions of the intellectual capital conceptual framework (internal capital, external
capital and human capital) together with the related subcategories (nine for the internal
capital framework, nine for the external capital and six for the human capital) are encoded
with the value 0 when the variable is not included in the annual statement, 1 if the value is
presented in a discursive fashion, 2 when the information is approached from a
quantitative point of view and 3 when the information is assessed monetarily. The results
from Australian researches are far from being systematic, despite the attention and
significance granted to intellectual capital. Australian entities do not have an agreed
framework for preparing reports concerning the intellectual capital, moreover, it appears
the „notion of assessing and reporting intellectual capital is enclosed into a rhetorical
framework lacking in content” (Guthrie & Petty, 2000, p. 246). This is also supported by
the statement according to which „almost every aspect related to intellectual capital has
been presented in a discursive fashion and not under monetary terms” (Guthrie & Petty,
2000, p. 247).
Brennan (2001) conducted a similar study with relation to Irish entities, analyzing
annual statements from 21 entities listed on the stocks market. The author used an
identical scheme as Guthrie & Petty (2000) in order to encode data in the content
analysis of annual reports and has identified similar results to the Australian study.
Results obtained indicated that the Irish context was similar to the Australian one
because there is no reporting frame for intellectual capital; hence the entities assess
their intellectual capital by using the qualitative method and less the quantitative one.
Just as Guthrie & Petty (2000) have noticed, these results emphasize the difficulties
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