Special issue: Measuring and managing intangibles for accounting use

Abstract

Albert Einstein, being a Noble Prize winner and a highly reputed physicist, was certainly working in an area different from management studies. However, his wellknown aphorism might well stand for the current state of the art of accounting and especially financial accounting. In our financial statements we essentially still follow the more-than-five-hundred-year old rules of Lucia Pacioli in measuring the economic impact of transactions in balance sheet and income statement. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that book values, which are more and more separated throughout the last decades from market values, explain only a small portion of stock market variances. This uneasy situation is largely amenable to the lack of recognition and disclosure of intangible resources in the external and internal accounting information set of companies. Therefore, how can we improve the measurement and visualisation of intangibles for accounting and management purposes? This is the focus of the present Special Issue of Journal of Management Control. The underlying idea is to present fresh dimensions in the study of corporate intangibles and intellectual capital with the aim of providing a positive contribution