Editorial

Citation

Roslender, R. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, Vol. 14 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrca.2010.31614baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, Volume 14, Issue 2

At the time of writing, the UK is in a process of post-election uncertainty as two of the three major political parties explore the possibilities for forming a governing coalition, while the leader of the third, defeated party continues to fulfil his constitutional role as Prime Minister. The campaign itself was equally something of a departure from what had gone before, not least because this was the first time that the UK had experienced televised Prime Ministerial debates. As agreement on the staging of three such debates was reached many months in advance of the formal announcement of the election itself, there was much hyping of them accompanied by considerable speculation about what impact they might have on the eventual outcome. That speculation continues and promises to do so for some considerable time after a new government emerges. Most commentators agree that the face of UK politics has certainly changed in 2010, change being a common theme throughout the election campaign, much as it had been in the USA in 2008.

Sadly, some things do not seem to change, however. The two largest parties, labour and conservative, disagreed about how the UK should act to climb out of the economic abyss in which it finds itself following the global financial crisis of 2008. While the conservatives argued for recovery based on the creation of new business enterprises, the labour party remained wedded to its traditional reliance on the existence of an extensive public sector. Both freely accept that the short to medium term future was going to be tough for everyone, either as a consequence of rising taxation (the so-called “jobs tax”) or the heightened prospect of unemployment. What remained largely implicit as these alternatives were hotly debated is that both alternatives inevitably mean that for the vast majority of those who remain in work, they must become ever more “efficient”. Like so, many similar panaceas, the pursuit of continued efficiency has a worrying underside, something trenchantly documented by Hopper and Armstrong in their seminal 1991 Accounting, Organizations and Society paper.

Extracting efficiency gains from those who bear little or no responsibility for the present economic ills besetting the UK, and many similar societies, is wholly at odds with the axiom that employees (“people”) are the vital component in any value creation and delivery process. While the notion of accounting for people has been suggested to demean or degrade employees, many of its advocates, including those who founded this journal, envisage such endeavours as fundamentally progressive. In this way, a key aspect the journal’s ambition is to promote debate about the worth of people within all types of organisation, and thereby contribute to the enactment of the sort of change that was so clearly absent from the hours of political debate recently evident in the UK.

The three papers included in this issue affirm the international dimensions of such debates, as well as the variety of ways available to progress them. The paper by Mahesh Joshi, Daryll Cahill and Jasvinder Sidhu is an exploratory study of intellectual capital performance within the Australian banking industry, using the value added intellectual coefficient approach developed by Pulic. The study identifies that for the sample of banks studied, human capital efficiency was relatively higher than capital employed efficiency and structural capital efficiency during the period 2005-2007. Abigail Marks’ paper embraces a strongly qualitative research design, being a study of the development and work experiences of an increasingly evident service occupation, that of massage therapy. Drawing on a range of sociology and organisational behaviour literatures, the paper identifies the current high degree of accessibility of the occupation and discusses a number of concerns expressed by practitioners regarding the consequences this may have for its integrity in the future. By contrast, the third paper is a theoretical contribution that seeks to explain some of the reasons for what the authors perceive to be a reluctance to disclose greater amounts of human capital information. Ananda Samudhram, G. Sivalingam and Bala Shanmugam draw attention to insights available from the resource-based view of the firm and from critical accounting, two quite different perspectives that potentially impact on successfully accounting for people.

Finally, I am sure that many readers will remember the Journal of Human Resource Costing and Accounting conference hosted by Birgitta Olsson in December 2006. A beautiful city at any time of the year, Stockholm is particularly vibrant in the weeks running up to Christmas. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend that event but I was the host for a small event in Stirling in July 1996, one at which the idea of creating a dedicated new journal was discussed by participants. In 2011, a third Journal of Human Resource Costing and Accounting conference is to be staged, once again in Scotland, in the very heart of the historic city of Edinburgh, in the shadow of its magnificent castle. The dates proposed for the event are 14-15 April, in some part to dovetail with the 34th European Accounting Association Congress in Rome the following week. For those readers who have never visited Edinburgh or Scotland, the conference provides a perfect reason for doing so in 2011. For those who already know what they have to offer, start looking for flights. Further details are available on the journal’s webpage and will be regularly updated in the coming months.

Robin Roslender