Editorial

Citation

Roslender, R. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, Vol. 14 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrca.2010.31614caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, Volume 14, Issue 3

Better late than never! Unfortunately, this issue appears a little later than scheduled. From my perspective, I see this as evidence of the increasing demands that researchers world wide are experiencing as we witness the continued intensification of work within the academy. Many thanks, therefore, for the continuing goodwill and cooperation that is evident among authors, reviewers and publishers alike.

In my editorial to the previous issue, I painted a rather gloomy picture about the prospects for employees in the UK following the General Election of May 2010. Those who have followed the political process will be aware that we still await the Coalition Government’s Spending Review announcement for the next five years. Talk of cuts in the public sector of 25 per cent will inevitably translate into swingeing job cuts, which will have knock-on effects for the private sector. It therefore came as a very welcome relief to be contacted in mid-July by a senior executive from Human Potential Accounting regarding the possibility of rejuvenating the Accounting for People initiative. The progress of this initiative to early 2004 was discussed in a paper in Volume 9, Issue 1 of this journal, and extended in a more detailed critique written with Joanna Stevenson and published in 2009 in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, both of which had come to the attention of his organisation. Not only is it good to know that our contributions are read and valued by non-academics, it is reassuring to know that there are others who continue to be committed to promoting the interests of employees.

The Accounting for People 2.0 Task Force will be launched in mid-October in London along with a Human Capital Handbook 2011. Further details can be found via Google, including the opportunity to participate via the now-obligatory social-networking mechanism. In parallel, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills recently commissioned a feasibility study of human capital reporting, while at the beginning of August the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills announced that it was revisiting the case for extended narrative reporting. This is also unfinished business in the UK context following the sudden abandonment of new Operating and Financial Review requirements in December 2005. If these initiatives bear (cr)edible fruit in the coming months and years, the UK will finally have caught up with those countries that have played a vanguard role in promoting accounting for people in the past decade and half. So, watch this space.

Planning for the April 2011 Edinburgh Conference continues. The event will be held in collaboration with Emerald Group and the recently created Centre for Research on Work and Wellbeing (CRoWW) at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. I am delighted to confirm the participation of two eminent contributors to the field, Eric Flamholtz and Ulf Johanson, at the event. Now, a Professor Emeritus at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Eric is acknowledged as the founder of human resource accounting in the late 1960s and the author of three editions of its core research monograph, together with scores of academic papers. Ulf was the founding Editor of the Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting in 1996 at Stockholm Business School. Together with the late Jan-Erik Grojer he pioneered the human resource costing and accounting approach in Scandinavia in the 1980s and 1990s, which provides the link between human resource accounting and intellectual capital. Updated details of the event can be found on the journal’s web site.

The three papers in the present issue once again confirm the human resource costing and accounting concept’s continuing relevance globally. Recent years have seen a resurgence in interest in human resource accounting on the Indian subcontinent. Naveed Iqbal Chaudhry and Muhammad Azam Roomi’s paper outlines the findings of an exploratory study of human capital development in the Pakistani textile manufacturing sector. Companies investing in their employees are found to experience higher levels of productivity and similar improvements in organisational performance. Being among the first such studies within Pakistan, the authors believe their work provides a sound basis on which to pursue a range of replication studies as well as encouraging increased investment in employee training and development initiatives.

The paper by Subhash Abhayawansa and James Guthrie provides a comprehensive, highly accessible review of the literature on the importance of intellectual capital information to the capital market. This was one of the topics that was instrumental in catalysing the development of the intellectual capital field in the mid-1990s, as the “hidden value” associated with rising stocks of intellectual capital within enterprises were seen as a potential threat to the efficient performance of the global capital market in some quarters. Unlike previous reviews, this paper organises the literature by research design.

The final paper by Howard Kahn, Joanna E. Stevenson and myself revisits some of the findings of a recent study funded by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, published in 2009 as Recognising Workforce Health as a Key Organisational Asset: A Study of Current Thinking and Practice. The responses of two samples of UK accounting and finance and human resource directors to a series of questions on health and wellbeing, viewed as a further key constituent of intellectual capital, are compared across private and public sector organisations. The views expressed by the human resource directors are found to be the most positive, although far from highly enthusiastic, while private sector accounting and finance directors exhibit only limited enthusiasm and in some cases considerable antipathy to the issues raised in the questionnaires.

Robin Roslender