Proceedings

and information about customers, suppliers and stakeholders (Luthy, 1998: 4). In
1996, Brooking defines IC as combined intangible assets that enable the company to
function and comprises market assets, intellectual property assets, human – centred
assets, infrastructure assets (Luthy, 1998: 4). In Edvinsson and Malone’s view, IC is
formed of human capital and structural capital (customer, organizational, innovation
and process capital) and considers it as debt issue (Lonnqvist, 2002). OECD defines
IC as human capital and structural capital, where the former refers to software,
distribution and supply chain, and the latter refers to employee’s resources, customers
and suppliers (Lonnqvist, 2002). Lonnqvist (2002: 14) by considering it as a synonym
of intangible assets defines IC as immaterial sources of value related to employees’
capabilities, organization’s resources and the way of operating them and the
relationship with its stakeholders. Some authors (Roslender and Fincham, 2001: 387)
are saying that IC is the “new” goodwill, something that the business builds up over
time, and which provides the major foundation for its continued competitive
advantage. According to other studies, (Stanciu, 2008, Morariu, 2010) IC is an
underlying characteristic of the employees, from which future benefits are expected to
flow to the company and that encompasses the followings: skills, capabilities,
experience, knowledge and last but not least morality. Ricceri (Striukova et al., 2008)
launches the idea according to which IC encompasses both resources that exist at a
particular point in time (a stock of IC) and the fluid way these resources are used and
interact with other resources to achieve the organisation’s goal. In 1997 Sveiby
(Guthrie and Petty 2000: 242) developed a framework for understanding IC that
classifies intangibles into three parts: internal structure (consisting of items such as
patents, concepts, models research and development, computer and administrative
systems, organizational culture and spirit), external structure (relationships with
customers, suppliers, brand names, trademarks, reputation) and employee competence
(education, skills, training, values, experience). The difficulty of defining IC and the
multiple understandings assigned to this concept made that reporting of IC to be a
challenging task for both the reporters and for the users of information. Numerous
studies investigated the quantity an the quality of information that companies provide
in respect of IC (Guthrie and Petty, 2000; Brennan, 2001; Bontis, 2003; Goh and Lim,
2004; Abdolmohammadi, 2005; Wong and Gardner, 2005; Bozzolan et al., 2006;
Vergauwen et al., 2007; Ax and Marton, 2008; Bruggen, 2009; Yau et al., 2009;
White et al., 2010; Oliveira et al., 2010; Yi and Davey, 2010; Ousama and Fatima,
2010; Branco et al., 2011; Singh and Kansal, 2011) and several studies were carried
out to provide evidence regarding the factors that my have contributed to the
disclosure of IC (Bruggen, 2009; Orens et al., 2009; Yau et al., 2009; Rimmel
et al., 2010; Sharabati et al., 2010; Oliveira et al., 2010; Huang et al., 2010; Branco
et al. 2011).
The number of the above studies carried out in different countries and even different
continents corroborated with the lack of literature in the case of Romanian companies,
challenged us to the present paper. Hence, we carry out a study that has two major
objectives: to analyse the quantity and the quality of IC items made in the annual
reports of the sample companies; and to focus on the analysis of the determinants of
ICD for the same sample companies. Twenty one annual reports as at 31 December
2009 of Romanian companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange were collected,
and represented the sample companies. IC framework used in this study is a
combination of that used by Guthrie and Petty (2000) and the framework resulted
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