Accounting for the Worth of Employees: Is the Discipline Finally Ready to Respond to the Challenge?
- 1 January 1997
- journal article
- Published by Emerald Publishing in Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting
- Vol. 2 (1) , 9-25
- https://doi.org/10.1108/eb029033
Abstract
Accounting for the worth of employees continues to attract the attention of accounting scholars. After more than thirty years of interest in the topic, however, comparatively little progress has been made in responding to the challenge of taking humans into account. A major reason for this may be that accounting for the worth of employees has hitherto been too closely bound up with the problematics of financial accounting and financial reporting. This has resulted in the widespread practice of conceptualising employee worth in terms of the hard accounting numbers normally associated with the discipline. Drawing on recent developments in the fields of both accounting for strategic positioning and critical accounting, this paper explores the promise which the emergence of a concern with the provision of soft(er) accounting information holds for any future attempts to account for employee worth.Keywords
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