Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Conflicting perspectives on the virtues of accounting for people

Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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YCPAC-1853; No. of Pages 13

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

journal homepage: www.elsev ier .com/ locate /cpa

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Conflictingperspectives on the virtues of accounting for people

Robin Roslender a,*, Abigail Marks b, Joanna Stevenson c

a University of Dundee and University of Aalborg, Denmarkb Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdomc Audit Scotland, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Received 5 August 2011

Received in revised form 9 June 2014

Accepted 30 June 2014

Available online xxx

Keywords:

Human capital accounting

Intellectual capital

Public interest

Social accounting

A B S T R A C T

It is no surprise to learn that to date accounting for people has attracted very little

attention from critical accounting researchers. From their standpoint there is little in the

history of accounting theory and practice that has served the interests of labour well. A

worrying consequence of this lack of engagement with accounting for people is that

potentially valuable insights may be disregarded by fiat. The recent emergence of human

capital accounting as an element of the broader intellectual capital field is identified here

as meriting closer scrutiny and debate. Informed by a wide ranging literature review,

together with some of the findings of a study of the issues associated with accounting for

employee health and wellbeing, viewed as a further key constituent of human capital, the

paper argues that a virtuous accounting intervention, in the form of a critical accounting

for people, might now be pursued to the benefit of both people and the broader society.

� 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction

The challenge of accounting for people has been engaged in the mainstream accounting literature for many decades. Itsmost recent generic approach, human capital accounting (HCA), demonstrates that advocates no longer seek to identify arobust means of including labour (employees) within financial statements, ideally ‘putting people on the balance sheet’.From a critical accounting perspective there is a variety of reasons why extending the accounting calculus in these waysmight be rejected with little hesitation; there is little in the history of accounting technologies to commend them to people intheir guise as labour. Such a summary rejection of the challenge of accounting for people disregards the sincerity that hasmotivated many of those who have contributed to this project, in some cases in the full knowledge that their ideas willinvariably be subject to distortion and misappropriation. It also denies the possibility that it may be possible for an enablingapproach to the task, one which will advance the interests of people qua labour rather than capital, in the first instance, toemerge out of a process of scrutiny of previous developments within this field.

The purpose of the present paper is to catalyse a much needed process of critique. It is based on the premise that despitethe disdain with which many critical accounting researchers might view extant attempts to account for people, thecontinuing absence of a systematic scrutiny of such activities remains a damaging oversight. The paper is also motivated bythe lack of critical engagement with the broader intellectual capital field, from whence the HCA approach to accounting for

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1383384857.

E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Roslender).

Please cite this article in press as: Roslender R, et al. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Conflicting perspectives onthe virtues of accounting for people. Crit Perspect Account (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2014.06.002

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2014.06.002

1045-2354/� 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.


mailto:[email protected]


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R. Roslender et al. / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2014) xxx–xxx2

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people has emerged. Despite a recent attempt to elicit contributions to such a critique within the pages of this journal(Mouritsen and Roslender, 2009), and with due acknowledgement of the work of O’Donnell (2004; see also O’Donnell et al.,2006a,b) and Dumay (2009, 2010), the early contributions of Yakhlef and Salzer-Morling (2000) and Roslender and Fincham(2001, 2004), remain largely unextended. The paper therefore provides an opportunity to debate the case for and againstcontinuing to advocate the pursuit of accounting for people in the light of a range of objections that can be raised against suchinitiatives. On balance it is concluded that it is preferable to be damned because one seeks to continue along this pathwaythan to be damned for failing to do so.

The paper is organised as follows. In the following section HCA is situated within a continuing tradition of attempting toaccount for people, as well as a promising development within the broader intellectual capital field that could serve theinterests of labour. Section three then identifies a number of arguments to the effect that critical accounting researchersshould continue to remain sceptical about attempts to take people into account. In the fourth section we report some of thefindings of a recent study of employee health and wellbeing viewed as a key constituent of human capital. These findingssuggest that there is much interesting work to be done by the accountancy profession in making a positive contribution tothe promotion of greater levels of employee health and wellbeing. The paper continues by debating the merits of progressingaccounting for people as an aspect of social accounting rather than within the corporate accounting framework, andidentifies recent interest in human rights reporting as displaying a number of interesting resonances that might now beexplored. A brief reflective/reflexive conclusion affirms the case for progressing the task of taking people qua labour intoaccount as a virtuous constituent of the critical accounting project.

2. Human capital accounting

The term HCA is a relatively recent addition to the lexicon of accountancy. It entered the literature as an aspect of thebroader intellectual capital field that emerged in the mid 1990s. A number of popular management texts including Brooking(1996), Edvinsson and Malone (1997), Roos et al. (1997), Stewart (1997) and Sveiby (1997a) had identified the growingimportance of stocks of intellectual capital, rather than physical and financial capital, for sustained value creation within thenew knowledge economy as a further phase in the evolution of the post-industrial society. From a financial accounting andreporting perspective the emergence of the intellectual capital concept promised to furnish an explanation for the rapidlygrowing disparity between the accounting-based book values of listed companies and their market values. The resultant‘‘hidden value’’ (Edvinsson, 1997), which had characterised financial markets since the late 1980s, had become increasinglyworrisome to transnational agencies such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment, who viewed it as potentially disruptive to the efficient operation of the global capital market and the future ofcapitalism itself (OECD, 1999; Johanson and Henningsson, 2007). Within the accountancy literature intellectual capital isalso widely referred to as ‘‘intangibles’’, suggesting some continuity with previous sources of hidden value in the form ofintangible assets, although normally on a much more modest scale.

Human capital was identified as one of three principal components of intellectual capital, alongside relational orcustomer capital and structural or organisational capital. Within each of these three components a lengthy list ofconstituents is identifiable. Some taxonomies highlighted considerable overlap with intangible assets, although fortunatelythis was accompanied by the abandonment of the traditional catch-all goodwill intangible asset. Equally, some of the assetsidentified as intellectual capital were (near) tangible in nature, and as a result problematised the intangibles designationitself. For the most part, many of the constituents of human intellectual capital were fairly familiar within the accountingliterature. These included experience and expertise, qualifications, training and capacities, newer soft skills, the ability to beinnovative and flexible, etc., the various attributes that employees exhibit and which result in their utilisation within thevalue creation and delivery process and/or key contributors to sustained competitive advantage in the market place.

The objective of HCA is self-explanatory – to take human capital into account. The commonsense meaning of thisobjective would be ‘putting people on the balance sheet’, using hard number financial valuations. Nowadays this is regardedas a technical impossibility and, more importantly, a misguided project that has now been largely abandoned. Conversely thecomparatively brief history of accounting for intellectual capital has provided some valuable insights into how it might bepossible to take human capital, in the form of the stock of attributes of a workforce, into account alongside the otherconstituents of an organisation’s stocks of intellectual capital. We will return to this below.

2.1. ‘Accounting for people’: a brief history

HCA can justifiably be regarded as the twenty-first century counterpart to human asset accounting, the first approach toaccounting for people that emerged in the mid 1960s, and which is forever associated with Hermanson (1963, 1964).Although he did not coin the phrase ‘putting people on the balance sheet’ – this can be attributed to Hekemian and Jones(1967) – Hermanson believed that it was desirable to incorporate employees, as operational assets, alongside stocks of fixedassets, as owned assets, within the balance sheet, reflecting their complementary roles within the business enterprise. In thisregard he was responding to Paton’s (1922) observation about the limited credibility of any balance sheet from which ‘‘aloyal and well-organised workforce’’ was absent. The challenge was to identify a robust means of determining the value ofemployees that would allow them to take their place alongside the organisation’s other assets. The problem lay in thesubjective nature of any and all valuation methodologies.



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Most accounting researchers and practitioners are more familiar with the second generic approach to accounting forpeople, usually referred to as human resource accounting, as advocated by Flamholtz. From his initial contribution withBrummet et al. (1968) through two editions of his seminal text Human Resource Accounting (1974a, 1985) to more recentpapers, e.g. Flamholtz (2009), he has favoured a managerial accounting approach to accounting for people. The foundationsof human resource accounting can be found in the three objectives of such exercises: to develop methods of measuringhuman resource cost and value designed to provide a quantitative basis for decision making by managers and investors; todevelop methods of measuring human resource cost and value necessary to monitor the effectiveness of management’sutilisation of human resources; and to promote a human resources perspective among managers (Flamholtz, 1974b).Flamholtz’s position is one of enlightened managerialism, which seeks to provide managers with better information abouthow to use their scarce, highly valuable human resources (assets) for the benefit of all stakeholders, rather than to effect theirbetter exploitation Although firmly wedded to the cost and value calculus of financial accounting and reporting, Flamholtzhad no great interest in providing balance sheet valuations of these human resources.

Human resource accounting was a major research topic in the mid 1970s but in the absence of any seemingly usefulinsights on incorporating labour within a balance sheet or enhanced control of labour, its appeal quickly subsided after 1980.In retrospect it is possible to identify a couple of subsequent approaches to accounting for people that predate the emergenceof the intellectual capital field and the possibility of HCA. The first of these was developed in Sweden and was termed humanresource costing and accounting (Grojer and Johanson, 1991,1998). Until recently this approach was largely unknownoutside of Scandinavia, only becoming more visible with the emergence of intellectual capital, which also has strongScandinavian roots. Human resource costing and accounting is an extension of human resource accounting, although itincorporates a utility analysis dimension. Utility analysis itself had emerged in parallel to human asset accounting (Cronbachand Glaser, 1965; Naylor and Shine, 1965), although was unconcerned with financial valuations. It was closely allied tomanagement control, as this is understood in Scandinavia, by some of its advocates, while others explored the possibility ofhuman resource income statements (e.g. Johanson and Backlund, 2006). A second development in the form of human worthaccounting was identified in Roslender and Dyson (1992) and Roslender (1997). It was presented as informed by the newmanagement accounting, utilising ‘soft’ numbers to represent employees within financial statements, although the power oftraditional hard numbers was never wholly disregarded.

2.2. ‘Growing’ people

As an element of intellectual capital accounting, HCA is widely envisaged as providing an account of how people have been‘grown’ within an organisation. The idea that intellectual capital accounting should focus on the growth of an organisation’sstocks of intangibles was advanced by Edvinsson, the field’s first leading figure. In his 1997 Long Range Planning paper Edvinssoninitially engaged with the unspoken preference to identify the financial value of an organisation’s stocks of intellectual capital,with the assistance of devices such as his own Skandia Value System. Recognising the longstanding difficulties that the pursuitof ‘hard’ number valuations had posed for accounting, including human asset accounting, Edvinsson suggested that a moreappropriate way of providing the necessary information was to develop alternative quantitative metrics that captured andrepresented the growth of these assets. As well as being made available within the organisation, such information could also becommunicated externally, providing a basis upon which to evaluate the performance of management, an attribute Flamholtzhad also advocated in relation to human resource accounting information.

In the case of human capital the issue was to determine how best to construct the story of human capital’s growth withinan accounting period. The idea is again consistent with the general emphases of the new management accounting during theprevious decade or so, and resonates with Roslender and Dyson’s call for the use of soft numbers within human worthaccounting. Relevance is implicitly the underlying prerequisite, as a result of which it is neither possible, nor desirable, tocommend universally applicable metrics for HCA purposes. Experimentation and innovation are to be encouraged inconstructing the ‘best’ story of human capital growth, something that is a feature of all accounting activity in the view ofcritical accounting researchers.

Human capital indicators have long been available in various forms and are traditionally seen to be part of the jurisdictionof the human resource (personnel) management function. They include size of the workforce, its demographiccharacteristics, turnover, days lost to illness, etc. More recently there has been a growing interest in workforce satisfactionin much the same way as organisations collect information on customer satisfaction (as part of its relational capitalmeasurement). A range of sophisticated indicators has evolved within HCA, reflecting the growing list of desirable twenty-first century employee attributes and thereby providing scope for significant creativity within the ranks of managementaccountants, preferably working in tandem with colleagues in the human resource (or knowledge) management function.

2.3. Reporting frameworks

As with any conventional account, measurement needs to be complemented with a reporting framework. Edvinsson(1997) also provided a useful basis on which to report the growth of stocks of intellectual capital, including human capital, inthe form of the Skandia Navigator, developed over a number of years at Skandia AFS, a Swedish financial services business(see also Mouritsen et al., 2001a). The Navigator is only one of a number of similar frameworks (or scoreboards) that emergedat this time, including the Intangible Assets Monitor (Sveiby, 1997b), the Eriksson Cockpit Communicator (Lovingsson et al.,




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2000) and the Value Chain Scoreboard (Lev, 2001). All of these frameworks can also be understood as variations of theslightly earlier first iteration Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton’s ‘new’ performance measurement and reporting toolthat complemented the development of new performance measures within the managerial accounting field (Kaplan andNorton, 1992, 1993). In due course Kaplan and Norton were to acknowledge the utility of their own framework for reportingon intangibles (and their growth?) (Kaplan and Norton, 2001, 2004).

Scoreboards provide the means of combining sets of information on the growth of an organisation’s stocks of intellectualcapital. While there is a high degree of consensus about the tripartite taxonomy of intellectual capital components referredto earlier, there is no necessity that any scoreboard-type reporting framework must routinely include only three elements.As with the Balanced Scorecard there is value in incorporating a fourth ‘financial’ element, since this will provide a morecomprehensive account of performance or ‘growth’. The Navigator utilises six perspectives, the Value Chain Scoreboardthree. The Intangible Assets Monitor remains closest to the intellectual capital taxonomy while also appending a financialperspective and making use of the ‘traffic lights’ approach to draw attention to differing levels of performance. Overall, theimperative of parsimony of content applies, translating into five or six key performance indicators of a leading and lag nature.In principle, however, there is no reason why fuller information may not be reported, internally, within say a human capitalscorecard (cf Becker et al., 2001).

Intellectual capital reporting has not been restricted to the use of scorecards. Narrative based reports were soondeveloped, most significantly as a result of a Danish government initiative that produced the Intellectual Capital Statementapproach (DATI, 2000; DMSTI, 2003; see also Bukh et al., 2001; Mouritsen et al., 2001b,c; Nielsen et al., 2014). This wasquickly followed by the Intellectual Capital Report (Meritum, 2002) and in Australia the Extended Performance Managementinitiative (Boedker, 2005). An Intellectual Capital Statement tells the story of value creation and delivery via a four elementnarrative, which is augmented by a range of key visualisations. One explanation of the change in emphasis from numbers tonarratives is that the Danish initiative was heavily informed by insights from the complementary knowledge managementperspective, which after its initial technical emphases in the early 1990s had begun to focus more on organisational cultureand kindred aspects. The role of human capital regularly came more to the fore in such narratives, evidence of which can beseen in the reports by Danish organisations such as Coloplast, Carl Bro and Systematic.

2.4. The current state of the art

Most of the developments identified in the previous paragraphs have now been in place for a decade. Subsequently therehas been a slowing down in the pace of innovation in respect of intellectual capital accounting in general and HCA inparticular. The research focus has shifted from largely normative concerns to the study of intellectual capital accounting ‘‘inaction’’ as understood in Hopwood (1976, 1983) or Chua (1986). A growing literature on intellectual capital reportingpractices has evolved, which can be found in a range of journals. Since intellectual capital reporting remains for the most parta voluntary activity there is currently not a great deal of order evident. Over time a discernible shift in emphasis has beennoted, however, so while many early studies identify information on relational capital issues to be the most prevalent, thereis now more evidence of reporting on both human capital and structural capital. Also of significance is the proportion ofstudies originating in the new economies of Asia, perhaps reflecting their reliance on intellectual capital rather than the otherfoundations of value creation (Beattie and Thomson (2010) provides a comprehensive overview of such studies; see alsoAlcaniz et al., 2011; Guthrie et al., 2012).

Roslender and Stevenson (2009), in this journal, document the rise and fall of the UK Labour Government’s interest inaccounting for people. This initiative was positioned as being consistent with the desirability of enhancing human capitalmanagement and was driven in some part by the need to establish, codify and publicise current best practice, preferably inthe form of easily and cheaply implemented solutions. Relevant practices were not found to be widespread, resulting inadvocacy of an ‘‘evolutionary’’ approach in the medium to long term. Roslender and Stevenson draw attention to a lack offamiliarity with most of the existing intellectual capital reporting mechanisms identified above, concluding that accountingfor people was probably never a key priority. The incoming Coalition Conservative and Liberal Democrat Government in May2010 identified a commitment to reinstate the Operating and Financial Review and ‘‘investigate further ways of improvingcorporate accountability and transparency (HMSO, 2010: 10). The political inclinations of the Secretary of State at theDepartment of Business, Innovation and Skills, Dr Vince Cable, and one of his junior ministers, Ed Davey, meant that theywere sympathetic to parties supportive of revisiting accounting for people. This quickly catalysed the establishment of anew, albeit informal, Accounting for People 2.0 Task Force (www.accountingforpeople.org). In September 2010 the UKCommission for Employment and Skills, an agency within the former ministry, commissioned a feasibility study of humancapital reporting, the main findings of which were published in early 2013 (UKCES, 2013), by which time Ed Davey had beenappointed Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. His successor, Norman Lamb, has exhibited different priorities,while the likelihood of a second Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2015 remains far from clear.

3. Accounting for people may now be possible . . . but is it desirable?

The emergence of HCA holds out the prospect of progressing accounting for people in ways that are highly distinct fromprevious developments. HCA takes people into account emphasising the importance of employees’ contributions tosustaining the enterprise, thereby promoting the interests of labour. It is no coincidence that this has occurred in the wake of


http://www.accountingforpeople.org/



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the development of the new management accounting (Kaplan, 1994, 1995; Roslender, 2011), which has re-establishedmanagerial accounting’s credentials as a valuable input to the strategic management process. In both aspects of accounting,i.e. measuring and reporting, accounting for people can now be progressed in ways that relieve advocates of such practices ofthe necessity of constantly fighting a rearguard action against those who find it difficult to see beyond the balance sheet and/or conceiving of labour other than as a cost to be continuously reduced.

Now that it may be possible to begin to meaningfully and more progressively account for people, is it desirable? As wenoted at the outset, there is little in the history of accounting to commend its technologies to labour. In the followingparagraphs we debate what seem to us to be among the key issues surrounding the case for incorporating HCA activitywithin the critical accounting project.

3.1. Means and ends

Although the emergence of HCA promises to provide a robust means of accounting for people, it is important not to losesight of the fundamental question of ends: why seek to take people into account in the first place? For Paton and Hermansonemployees merit inclusion on the balance sheet because of their importance within business enterprises. The balance sheet,however, remains a financial statement created primarily to provide information for the owners of enterprises. Flamholtzshares the view that employees merit being taken into account, his human resource accounting approach being intended toprovide information about employees, designed to promote their better utilisation. This might readily translate intoexploitation by management of course. Edvinsson’s observation that information on human capital growth could provide abasis on which to assess the performance of managers charged with the task of growing the organisation’s stocks ofintellectual capital, has the consequence of extending management control within the enterprise. Finally, howeverprogressive or iconoclastic the Danish Intellectual Capital Statement approach might be, responsibility for their preparationresides with managers rather than the vast majority of employees. Consequently, when viewed from the standpoint oflabour (including managerial labour), they can readily be seen as being no more progressive than previous approaches toaccounting for people.

This conclusion previously persuaded Roslender and Fincham (2001, 2004; see also Fincham and Roslender, 2003) that inorder to uncouple HCA from its managerialist foundations, it is necessary for employees to develop and retain control theirown accounts of their contribution to the value creation and delivery process. In so doing, narrative-based HCA is takenforward to the next level. Subsequently, Roslender et al. (2006) identified the possibilities of self-accounting interventions inrespect of employee health and wellbeing, while more recently Roslender and Hart (2010) have considered the case forcustomer self-accounting. Self-accounting is argued to be consistent with the idea of enabling accountings as the realisationof the emancipatory intent of some interpretations of Critical Theory (Broadbent et al., 1997; Gallhofer and Haslam, 1997,2003; Roslender and Dillard, 2003). The end now envisaged is that of employees (or customers) being able to recount theirown stories rather than have these told on their behalf by accounting practitioners or other management functionaries (whoalso would be encouraged to produce their own self-accounts). Such developments would also seem to mark a new phase inaccountability.

An initial difficulty, however, is not how such stories might be told but how they will be reported. Fincham and Roslender(2003) identified incorporating employee self-accounts within an intellectual capital account that would in turn form part ofan expanded business report. Enthusiasm for developing such extended reporting frameworks had steadily increasedfollowing the publication of the Jenkins Report in the mid 1990s (AICPA, 1994), being very evident in the English Institute’sNew Models for Business Reporting lengthy discussion paper published in late 2003 (ICAEW, 2003; see also ICAS, 1999). Recentinterest in the development of integrated reporting approaches is informed by many of the same issues that motivated thebusiness reporting debate (IIRC, 2011, 2013; see also Beattie and Thomson, 2013). Since responsibility for the production ofany business report (or similar) would remain within the remit of management, Roslender and Fincham recognised thatemployees risked losing control of their stories, which could mean these being turned against them in the same way asconventional accountings. Consequently, in organisations where management might be sympathetic to the promotion ofemployee self-accounting, the involvement of employee representatives within any such initiatives, ideally in a directivecapacity, remains a key requirement. Over time Roslender and Fincham have advocated the promotion of autonomous self-accounting, via the rapidly expanding technologies of the social media. A second obstacle is how to secure high levels ofinvolvement across a workforce. Individuals are being invited to share thoughts about their work experiences withcolleagues in a more formal way than is common within the existing social media, where voluntarism prevails. A relatedconcern is that employers may find ways of manipulating such media, possibly by being prepared to offer resources tosupport participation, e.g. permitting individuals to ‘blog’ for short periods of time while in the workplace. A furtherimportant challenge is how to encourage the wider group of stakeholders to access the envisaged stream of self-accounts,assuming that they are sufficiently interested in the first place.

3.2. Nothing quite compares to labour

While there are strong grounds for continuing to designate any means of accounting for people as a dangerous managerialtechnology, even if it could be made otherwise, why view people through the specific lens of accounting? Most advocates ofaccounting for people to date believe that taking people into account in some way, acknowledges and highlights the crucial




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importance of labour, and its individual and collective attributes, within the present age, as well as those that have gonebefore it. For some this may well be sufficient, while others would see it as being only the beginning of a highly desirableprocess.

In their critique of the Accounting for People initiative, Roslender and Stevenson (2009) argue that the conventional way ofviewing labour within accounting is as a cost, i.e. as a charge within the profit and loss account. To increase profit, simplyreduce the cost of labour, by means of some programme of work reorganisation, e.g. making people work more efficiently(=harder), and perhaps replacing some people by cheaper (and more controllable) machinery, deskilling people, transferringoperations to low wage economies, etc. As a result, accountants have found themselves complicit in the exploitation ofgenerations of labour. In opposition to this, Roslender and Stevenson affirm the desirability of designating employees asassets rather than costs, albeit not denying that they also give rise to costs, which for them is a secondary consideration.Viewing employees as assets does not automatically imply seeking to incorporate them within the balance sheet, however.As noted earlier in the paper, the distance between the conventional view of what defines an asset and the nature of theemployee status (IASB, 1989, 1998) makes this a technical impossibility within the prevailing regulatory framework.Consequently, Roslender and Stevenson recognise the need for a more radical approach, hence their enthusiasm for andadvocacy of some form of HCA, which emphases on growing employee attributes and reporting this growth by means ofsome combination of numbers and narratives, inter alia self-narratives.

In response to Roslender and Stevenson, Spence and Carter (2011) observe that all such thinking gives rise to a damagingre-objectification of employees and therefore should be avoided. Further reflection confirms that there are no similar assetsto labour, however. Labour is quite different to land and buildings, both of which are inanimate assets, as are the otherconstituents of physical capital such as machinery, fixtures and fittings, motor vehicles, etc., those assets alongside whichPaton and Hermanson wished to include employees on the balance sheet. Hermanson’s concession that employees differfrom these other assets because they are not owned by the enterprise, while sound, is a diversion from the fact that labourcreates most physical assets and in the case of agricultural land, makes it ‘workable’ too. Land which exists in the form of aninvestment asset, very much a twentieth century asset, probably shares more in common with financial capital than physicalcapital, and thereby is also fundamentally dissimilar to labour.

Scrutinising the broader intellectual capital designation reaffirms the uniqueness of labour. Initially it might appear thatthe various intellectual capital assets must be similar to each other, or why else would it be necessary to distinguish themfrom physical and financial capital? On closer inspection, however, the other two components of intellectual capital –relational and structural capital – both include constituents that can readily be redesignated as physical capital. For example,some constituents of infrastructural capital such as management information systems and knowledge databases are notsignificantly different from traditional physical capital and could be accounted for in similar ways. In this regard they mayindeed also be similar to intellectual property, many forms of which are already included in balance sheets in the guise ofintangible assets. This said, a number of constituents of structural capital such as managerial philosophy, corporate culture,knowledge networks, etc., are quite distinct, however, as well as being highly intangible intangibles. It is this that persuadedRoslender and Fincham (2001, 2004) that they might best be understood as forming part of the primary intellectual capital ofan enterprise alongside labour itself (see also Ahonen and Hussi, 2007). In aggregate they provide a facilitative infrastructurefor value creation and delivery by labour, including the development of various constituents of secondary intellectual capital.

In the case of relational capital, it is also possible to identify constituents such as brands, customer lists and databases thatcan be recognised and accounted for as intangible assets. Complementing them are newer forms of relational capital such ascorporate reputation, customer relationships, supply chains and distribution channels, preferred supplier networks, etc.Their presence provides significant competitive advantage for enterprises in the same way that their absence maycompromise performance. While it might be possible to sub divide relational capital in a variety of ways, as in customercapital, their externality attribute differentiates them from human and structural capital. As a result, there is a strong case fortaking them into account in aggregate, either within a scoreboard reporting framework or as an element of an intellectualcapital reporting narrative.

Although it may be accurate to regard labour, or more correctly its individual and collective attributes, together with anumber of people-based constituents of structural capital as vital organisational assets, the uniqueness of primaryintellectual capital vis a vis secondary intellectual capital, as well as the other traditional forms of capital, is sufficient topreclude accounting for them as assets alongside other forms of capital, even in ways that might otherwise be applauded. Oras Mouritsen et al. (2001a) have previously observed:

Pleathe

Intellectual is hardly in continuity with common, ordinary conceptions about what capital is. (p. 147)

3.3. And why do we privilege accounting in the first place?

Thirty years of critical accounting research have reinforced concerns that accounting encompasses a range of practicesthat do not benefit labour. Accounting was developed and has evolved as a generic managerial technology that serves theinterests of those who own the enterprise or are charged with maximising the benefits gained from the resources put at theirdisposal in the case of not-for-profit organisations. While accounting in the guise of financial management is not the onlybasis on which to manage an enterprise, there are few organisations that do not give some prominence to statements of theirfinancial performance.

se cite this article in press as: Roslender R, et al. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Conflicting perspectives onvirtues of accounting for people. Crit Perspect Account (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2014.06.002



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What is it that accounting (or financial management) delivers? Assurance that the enterprise is operating successfully,providing stakeholders with credible, reliable information. The objection that there continues to be a succession ofunfortunate financial scandals is readily explained away by identifying individuals as incompetent or corrupt (or both), andoften with considerable justification. Accounting’s capacity to provide a basis for comparing performance between entities isalso an important attribute. This is the case whether comparisons are made across a particular sector or within a singleorganisation with many autonomous operating units. The availability of accounting numbers allows the identification ofunderperforming businesses or business units, together with any that might appear to promise above average returns.Within the not-for-profit sector, the development of similar metrics has facilitated the delivery of greater value for moneyduring the past thirty years. A third attribute that ensures the continuing appeal of accounting is that it provides a robustmeans of planning future activity, most notably through the mechanism of the budget. The incorporation of leadingindicators into Balanced Scoreboard frameworks for performance measurement and reporting continues this prospectiveemphasis. Contemporary budgeting technologies also incorporate extensive monitoring, feed back and feed forwardmechanisms, designed to ensure that the organisation remains on its projected course.

Most significantly, however, accounting provides a dependable means of controlling an organisation, using a set ofrepresentations that the majority of people understand, albeit not necessarily in minute detail and, equally importantly,accept. Unlike other forms of capital, people cannot be so readily controlled by organisations. As a consequence, anytechnology that promises to extend the control of labour is likely to attract the support of those who seek it. The failure ofhuman asset and human resource accounting is therefore better understood in terms of their common incapacity to deliverhigher levels of management control than any technical difficulties associated with these approaches. The initial enthusiasmevident for some form of HCA, within the broader intellectual capital concept, in the middle 1990s, was in some part based onits promise to provide a means to the management control of the growing cadres of intellectual labour in the twenty-firstcentury. Conversely, in the light of its shortcomings as a control technology, enthusiasm for HCA has waned to some extent,something reflected in the changing emphases within the intellectual capital literature in recent years noted in the previoussection. Gone are essentially theoretical contributions, with strong normative inclinations, to be replaced by an escalatingnumber of studies of intellectual capital reporting practices, including human capital reporting.

In summary: these various objections to the principle of accounting for people suggest that an enthusiasm about theprospects for a progressive form of HCA may be misplaced. While accounting for people might finally be more feasible, andeven interpreted as promising benefits for labour, the underlying emphases of any such project mean that it continues to beproblematic and therefore to be viewed with suspicion. In order to address such continuing reservations, the remainder ofthe paper is devoted to presenting further observations to the contrary.

4. Health and wellbeing as human capital

Any critical accounting for people needs to privilege the interests of employees, doing so by focusing interest on issuesthat are of significance to them. One such issue is the promotion of greater levels of employee health and wellbeing identifiedas a further constituent of human capital. In the mid-2000s a group of scholars interested in exploring the managementcontrol of work health field came together at Uppsala University. A number of participants had played an important role inthe development of intellectual capital accounting, while others came from the health economics and health managementfields. The principal output of this collaboration was a 2007 collection of essays entitled Work Health and Management

Control, edited by Johanson, Ahonen and Roslender. Contrary to what might be imagined given the centrality of themanagement control focus within the network, the experience provided a valuable forum in which to think about thepotential relationship between employee health and wellbeing and extending the scope of critical accounting.

Recognising employee health and wellbeing as a further constituent of the human capital component of intellectualcapital is a novel observation (Roslender et al., 2006, 2012; Ahonen et al., 2007). When employees are unwell they are not in aposition to fully engage with their work, and thereby denied the exercise of their capacities for value creation and delivery.The worryingly high levels of sickness absence evident in the early years of the twenty-first century, particularly inScandinavia, were understood to be in large part the result of workplace factors rather than the consequence of thepersistence of general medical conditions. Growing levels of stress related absence, occasioned by the intensification oflabour within the office attendant upon the pursuit of so-called ‘right-sizing’ initiatives, generic processes to whichaccounting and financial management technologies have made a major contribution, were a major concern. The prevailinggenerous levels of sickness absence payments probably also played their own part, as did rising levels of worker affluence. Inthe last analysis, however, it was recognised that many people were genuinely, i.e. certifiably, unable to present themselvesfor work, a situation detrimental to individual employees and their families, the broader society as well as employers.

The general tenor of intellectual capital theory asserts an imperative to ensure that as many employees as possiblepresent themselves for work rather than to their medical practitioners. In this vein, growing employee health and wellbeingsuggests itself as a powerful commercial imperative, while being able to report relatively low levels of sickness absence ascompared with competitors communicates a powerful message to those monitoring such information. There are someprovisos, however, not least the presenteeism phenomenon (Hemp, 2004; Nielsen et al., 2007; Bockerman and Laukkanen,2010; Chandola, 2010). Systematic denial of health issues, for fear of losing employment, is only likely to store up future,longer term absence, especially in relation to health. Conversely, employees fortunate enough to work for employers who




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actively seek to promote a healthy organisation might experience real benefits that could in turn enhance their generalquality of life.

An exploratory study of how a number of issues related to employee health and wellbeing are understood within UKorganisations was recently pursued. Two samples of 1000 accounting and finance directors and human resourcedirectors were surveyed, two thirds of whom were employed in the private sector, the remainder in a variety of publicsector and charitable organisations including local government, the universities, charities and health authorities. Thequestionnaires used for both samples were very largely identical, although the one used in the case of accounting andfinance directors included several additional questions on the users of accounting information. The questionnaire’s layout was designed to allow respondents to offer commentary on their answers. In addition, three short case studies wereconducted in a local authority, a utilities company and a multinational pharmaceuticals company. In total 233 usablequestionnaires were returned, the greater number (134) coming from human resource directors (see Roslender et al.,2010 for further details).

The overall finding was that knowledge of and interest in the issues presented in the questionnaire was relativelylimited. This was not surprising since a previous field study on the intellectual capital topic conducted by Fincham andRoslender (2003, 2004; see also Roslender and Fincham, 2004) had indicated that by comparison with Scandinavia, aswell as many Australasian countries, the UK lagged some distance behind, both in terms of research activity and theuptake of the intellectual capital concept. Greater enthusiasm for viewing health and wellbeing as importantconstituents of an organisation’s stocks of intellectual capital was evident among human resource directors in publicsector and charitable organisations. At the opposite end of the spectrum were accounting and finance directors inprivate sector organisations, some of whom were clearly exercised by our enquiries. There was little to differentiate thepositions identifiable with private sector organisation human resource directors and public sector and charitableorganisation accounting and finance directors. For the most part, the responses from human resource directors and fromwithin the public sector and charitable organisations’ sub samples were more encouraging but still fell short of what theresearchers regarded as being desirable.

In terms of the detail of the findings, mental health issues were acknowledged as being of rapidly growing significance, aview consistent with survey findings such as those published annually by the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel andDevelopment (CIPD). The increased prevalence of such conditions has resulted in a growing proportion of longer termabsences, since individuals commonly find it difficult to ‘shake off’ such problems in the short term. Monitoring and dealingwith health and wellbeing issues varied from organisation to organisation. Beyond basic provisions such as collectingsickness absence information, compulsory return to work interviews and Employee Assistance Programmes, healthpromotion initiatives and in the case of more senior employees access to health insurance provisions, few organisationsseemed to be pro-active with regards to health and wellbeing. More worrying was the observation that for the majority ofrespondents, there was little indication that such health and wellbeing issues were expected to attract greater attention andresource commitment in the future. The study was completed before the effects of recent economic downturn became fullyapparent. The resultant threat of unemployment as a ‘response’ to high propensities to sickness absence (and thus escalatinglevels of presenteeism), only serves to affirm a largely negative picture.

Further responses provide insights into a seeming apathy of accounting and finance directors to the issues surroundingworkforce health. Asked whether it would be possible to place a financial value on workforce health, fewer than halfanswered affirmatively, compared with almost two thirds of human resource directors. Their accompanying commentssuggest that accounting and finance directors may be being swayed against accounting for human capital because theyrecognise that this is not feasible within accounting as they understand and practice it. Accounting and finance directorswere evenly divided about whether workforce health might be regarded as an organisational asset, with a small number ofrespondents suggesting that seeking to then account for it could prove a distraction. By contrast, human resource directorswere much more receptive to such ideas, possibly reflecting their lack of understanding of its technicalities.

When accounting and finance respondents were questioned on how they might attempt to account for such attributes asworkforce health, a sizeable number mentioned approaches that combined numbers and narratives. This is consistent withthe leading edge emphases evident in the general intellectual capital reporting literature reviewed in section two.Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the UK profession will voluntarily begin to explore issues such as accounting foremployee health and wellbeing. Such initiatives are more likely to come from human resource professionals, possiblysupported by government. This could be one aspect of a reinvigorated Accounting for People initiative as this was mootedearlier in the paper. Considerable further learning on the part of the UK accountancy profession about developments in theintellectual capital, intangibles and related fields would be required to make such an initiative a success, a conclusion largelyendorsed in a UK study of intellectual capital reporting published by Beattie and Thomson (2010).

Accounting for employee health and wellbeing is very far removed from the view that accounting for people is principallyconcerned with meeting the challenge of finding some means of ‘putting people on the balance sheet’. In the light of theaccounting and finance profession’s seeming ambivalence towards the issues associated workforce health and wellbeing,coupled with an acknowledgement of the inherent limitations of the traditional accounting and reporting calculus, theopportunity exists for the injection of new thinking into this particular space. Self-narratives on the subject of individual andcollective health and wellbeing improvement projects, designed to ensure that this dimension of their human capital ispermanently enhanced, strongly merit further exploration and commendation as part of an evolving critical accountingproject.




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5. (Re)connecting accounting for people and social accounting

The social accounting resonances of a critical accounting for people might also be explored. In its contemporary guisesocial accounting, understood as seeking to be accountable to society in the first instance, can be traced back to the middle tolate 1960s, although it may be possible to identify its origins rather earlier (Gray et al., 1987; Guthrie and Parker, 1989; Gray,2002; Cooper et al., 2005; Gray and Laughlin, 2012). This was an era when radical thinking was much in evidence across theWestern world. In retrospect, accounting to society is very much an example of the sort of thinking that was designatedcounter cultural, in this instance an alternative to the prevailing mode (culture) of corporate accounting. Although much ofthe early interest in accounting for people did not incorporate such ideas, in his 1974 monograph Human Resource Accounting

Flamholtz argues that human resource accounting exhibits many affinities with the corporate social accountability project,as in the case of Abt Associates Inc., suggesting it warrants at least equal attention as its financial reporting dimensions. Thesocial accounting inclinations of human resource costing and accounting are also evident, consistent with the Swedish socialsettlement of the 1980s and 1990s, although this nexus is significantly less evident in work on HCA to date.

A strong case exists for considering how it might be possible to (re)couple aspects of accounting for people, includinghealth and wellbeing, with social accounting rather than corporate accounting. An indication of what might be achievablecan be gleaned from papers included in the recent CPA special issue on accounting for human rights. Contributors agree thatif we are to take human rights into account, this should be via mechanisms afforded by social accounting such as corporateaccountability, corporate social responsibility and similar social accounts. These counter accounts are underpinned by thedesire to promote a better world in which the rights of all people are fully recognised and realised. A critical accounting forpeople, as this has been understood to this point, is concerned with promoting the interests of people as employees (labour),in the workplace. Its focus is on a specific set of human attributes and on their fate in a particular location, the workplace. Bycontrast a social accounting for people encompasses all facets of the human being, thereby collapsing the artificial boundarythat has been constructed between the enterprise/organisation and the broader society (cf Hines, 1988). As a consequence,what might be regarded as progressive attempts to draw employers’, employees’ and their families’, and the broadersociety’s attention to the highly damaging processes and consequences of, e.g. work-driven ill-health, now become anincremental contribution to a much broader programme of revealing the widespread, systematic attack on human dignitywithin the globalised social order.

In an earlier paper, Roslender et al. (2006) distanced their interest in employee health and wellbeing from the morefamiliar health and safety couple. They argued that although it would be wrong to suggest that the health and safety problemhas disappeared in the most advanced societies, there is a strong case for recognising that health and wellbeing now pose agreater problem for employees, noting that work related ill health was increasingly the result of factors other than accidentsor breaches of safety legislation. In stark contrast, Cooper et al. (2011) demonstrates that we should never overlook the basichuman right that

Pleathe

When a worker goes to work each day, they should feel safe in the knowledge that they will return home safe andsound afterwards (p. 755).

They identify the 2004 case of ICL Plastics as an example of a preventable disaster, in which nine people lost their lives anda further thirty-three were injured. Cooper et al. recommend the development of a health and safety report as a means ofaccounting for this particular human right. Such an account would incorporate several elements including unabridgedHealth and Safety Executive reports, company risk assessment documents, commentaries on the latter documents producedby employees, relevant trade unions and any independent advisory bodies, such as a proposed Scottish Hazards AdviceCentre in the wake of ICL, together with a financial statement on health and safety issues. Such an account may have more incommon with the self-accounting approach discussed in section three than with prevailing health and safety disclosures,which in the main would tend to be at best modest, reinforcing Cooper et al’s own assessment of the limited significance thatthis particular human right presently has for many employers.

The case for more extensive accounting for human rights has been promoted as part of the Global Reporting Initiative(GRI). Since its inception in 1997, the GRI has become regarded as the leading agency in the field of sustainability reporting,whose guidelines have been embraced by several thousand organisations to report on economic, environmental, social andgovernance issues. In collaboration with the United Nations Global Compact and Realizing Rights, the GRI publishedCorporate Human Rights Reporting: An Analysis of Current Trends late in 2009. The survey indicates that such reporting isincreasing, with a small number of organisations engaged in highly progressive practices, examples of which are outlined insection four of the report. Invariably these accounts are included within corporate sustainability reports, which the GRI hasconsistently sought to promote, although in the knowledge that information/reporting of this sort remains widely regardedas of secondary importance by many if not most accounting practitioners. Article 16 of the 2011 United Nations Statement of

Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights represents a challenge to the prevailing voluntarism associated with humanrights reporting by businesses, and makes explicit reference to the desirability of providing a formal ‘‘statement’’ in whichenterprises ‘‘set out publicly [their] responsibilities, commitments, and expectations’’ on human rights, implicitly anelement of their formal account(ing) to society (UNHR, 2011).

The 2009 report identifies a number of challenges to those seeking to advance future human rights reporting. There is aneed to report on rights issues in a balanced way, identifying both the positive and negative aspects of such interventions,while also avoiding the temptation to report on specific issues but to remain quiet on others. Likewise it is important to avoid

se cite this article in press as: Roslender R, et al. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Conflicting perspectives onvirtues of accounting for people. Crit Perspect Account (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2014.06.002



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simply emphasising local accomplishments, albeit in a balanced way, while failing to address the more systemicmanifestations of human rights issues. There is also the danger of being too reliant on demonstrable and well-meaningphilanthropy. Arguably the greatest challenge lies in continuing to pursue process reporting at the expense of performanceor impact reporting. The report highlights the desirability of providing information of the latter sort rather than the currenttendency to be over reliant on ‘‘reporting on the existence of processes’’ (GRI/UN/RR, 2009: 7). What is required is anappropriate balance between contextual and explanatory narratives and incisive outcome numbers, accompanied by areflective narrative, which is much the same challenge that also faces anyone who seeks to account for people within thecorporate accounting paradigm, and arguably a growing extent of the generality of contemporary accounting. Finally, the‘accounting’ credentials of human rights accounting will be further protected if they are subject to an appropriate variant ofthe assurance process, in which those with recognised human rights’ expertise will be required to play a major part.

The range of human rights issues about which it is desirable to report is extensive. The GRI G3 Guidelines identify sevengeneric categories of human rights on which there might be a focus: investment and procurement practices; non-discrimination; freedom of association and collective bargaining; child labour; forced and compulsory labour; security; andindigenous people. What these share in common is a focus on the ethical robustness of the practices by means of whichorganisations seek to create and deliver value to their various stakeholders, particularly as these impinge on the dignity ofhuman beings. The GRI/UN/RR (2009) report also identifies a number of specific examples that convey the essence of what isat stake: Mondi’s commitment to safeguarding the rights of HIV-positive employees; Proctor and Gamble’s ‘‘PUR’’ initiativethat supplies its water purifying products at cost to communities with no access to clean drinking water; GSK’s commitmentto preferential pricing of pharmaceuticals in pursuit of the universal access to health; and Danfoss’ discussion of itsdeployment of prison labour. In every case it is not the attributes of people qua labour that are being taken into account,rather their being qua humans.

From even this very brief engagement with the nascent accounting for human rights literature, the social accountingmode would seem to promise the possibility of counter accounts of people that represent them as rather more than simplyemployees or assets, and thereby more likely to contribute to the promotion of a better world. However, as is also the casewith conventional number and narrative HCA approaches, to the extent that such accounts remain largely the work ofcorporations they can only furnish partial social accounts, which intentionally or sometimes unintentionally, seek toenhance the reputation of the corporation as much as recognise and promote the dignity of those human beings on which thecorporation’s activities impact. Independent social accounting agencies do exist, for example, AccountAbility, SocialAccountability International and the Social Audit Network. Critical accounting scholars also have the opportunity to producesocial accounts but even after over three decades of impressive growth and influence, the critical accounting project remainslargely a minority interest. If social accounting for people is to become the force it ought to be, then accounting practitionersmust not only embrace the underlying principles of accounting to society but must ensure that society’s members assumethe leading role in the telling of stories about the protection and enhancement of the rights of humans within a still hostilesocial milieu, rather than simply as employees or human capital. It is to be hoped that the opportunity to furnish more wide-ranging self-accounts than those initially advocated by Roslender and Fincham may prove more compelling to those whosesituations such accounts are designed to enhance.

A fruitful way of approaching these issues is to take every opportunity to impress upon our students the desirability forthem to expand the boundaries of what might be identified as accounting, while also increasing their awareness of the manysimilarities between their own future place within the social organisation of work and those of the mass of employees. It isthey rather than us who are likely to find themselves in a position to reconfigure accounting as a practical activity. In respectof what they might identify as accounting, this extends to the issues that it might now be necessary to take into account andto the growing range of options about how this might be accomplished. The growing volume of critical accounting literaturemeans that many of the necessary insights are readily available for study and discussion.

6. On reflection . . .

At the outset of this particular writing project, the principal objective was to catalyse what we believe is a valuable debatewithin the critical accounting space, about the desirability of seeking to take people into account, as one aspect of the projectof promoting social betterment. Hitherto, critical accounting researchers have shown little interest in accounting for peoplefor a variety of reasons, not least because accounting has done very little to promote labour’s interests, which are very largelyat odds with the prevailing accounting discourse. At the same time, it is likely that like their mainstream counterparts, manycritical accounting researchers continue to view accounting for people as identifying some means of ‘putting people on thebalance sheet’ or, even worse, seeking to extend control to an inherently unruly labour force. That accounting for peoplemight be made more progressive as a result of the emergence of HCA within the broader intellectual capital field, issomething that merits being brought to the attention of critical accounting researchers, and in the guise of self-accountscould be argued to promise to contribute to an enabling accounting project.

The counter-arguments are very persuasive, as is obvious in section three above, the conclusion to which is essentiallythat at best it may be an agreement to disagree as to the potentialities of a further round of taking people into account.Accounting for an issue as important as the health and wellbeing of labour would seem to open up a new flank in thecampaign. Once identified, it is not difficult to recognise this sub-set of employee attributes as offering a new proving groundfor a progressive accounting for people. At the same time, however, these same attributes are sufficiently far removed from




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what the new management accounting has extended to as to demonstrate that such considerations very quickly escape theconfines of the cost and value calculus. Personal narratives about health improvement, resultant wellbeing enhancementand the fortitude to withstand the stresses of the twenty-first century knowledge workplace seem likely to captureemployee growth in ways inconceivable within the Skandia Navigator or Intangible Assets Monitor.

This conclusion also strongly suggests that the future of accounting for people may be better served by being prepared toabandon the confines of the accounting and finance space all together. As observed early in the paper, the motivations todevelop feasible approaches to intellectual capital accounting were in significant part driven by concerns evident withinglobal financial agencies such as the OECD and World Bank, whose role is to protect the interests of capital and secure thereproduction of its dominance over time. Of necessity, a premium was placed upon developing approaches that werecommensurate with the precepts of corporate accounting. This inevitably impacts on any otherwise appealing advances suchas HCA, even in the form of self-accounting. Roslender and Fincham (2001, 2004) acknowledge this in their argumentsregarding the need to find some means of incorporating self-accounting within the financial statement package (see alsoFincham and Roslender, 2003). In order to progress accounting for people, a powerful case exists for reconnecting it withsocial accounting, thereby breaking the continuing link with corporate accounting. The very brief discussion of the recentinterest in accounting for human rights in the last section suggests that health and wellbeing issues, identified here as anexample of new ground that accounting for people should now break, are probably best taken into account as a component ofaccounting to society, which itself might be enhanced through the widespread exploration of the potentialities of a self-accounting mode.

A final thought is in order, however. Throughout the paper we have remained silent on the existence a considerableliterature that documents how people are increasingly taken into account by a pervasive accountingisation process thatmanifests itself across contemporary society, in very large part with highly contestable consequences. This absence should isnot to be understood as denying that such practices constitute accounting(s) for people. Only as we reach the end of thispaper do we realise that throughout (and beyond) it, we have sought to privilege accounting for people qua labour. This isclear from the second sentence of the abstract, only now what was probably implicit becomes explicit, thereby affirming thespecific critical credentials of our own interpretation of the critical accounting project.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Jesse Dillard and Ken McPhail, participants at a staff seminar at the University of Dundee and atthe Critical Perspectives on Accounting conference in Clearwater FL in July 2011, two anonymous reviewers and ChristineCooper for their many insightful observations on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Documents

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Conflicting perspectives on the virtues of accounting for people