Moving from Accounting for People to Accounting with People: A Critical Analysis of the Literature and Avenues for Research

Corinne Ollier Bessieux, Emmanuelle Negre () and Marie-Anne Verdier ()
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Emmanuelle Negre: IRGO - Institut de Recherche en Gestion des Organisations - UB - Université de Bordeaux - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE) - Bordeaux
Marie-Anne Verdier: LGCO - Laboratoire Gouvernance et Contrôle Organisationnel - UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier - UT - Université de Toulouse

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Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of the ‘accounting for people' literature and to suggest avenues for research that encourage this literature to take a radical emancipatory turn by using dialogic accounting. Our review covers the past five decades and concentrates on a corpus of 109 articles published in 22 accounting journals. Although the social agenda was initially central to the rise in the accounting for people literature, it was quickly supplanted by economic and financial objectives. The more recent focus on Human Capital (HC), driven by the emergence of a new spirit of capitalism, appears to have breathed new life into the accounting for people literature. However, the HC concept also (i) simplifies humans' subjective qualities by overquantification through a reification process that extends the sphere of commodification to humans and (ii) reinforces labor control processes. We highlight the need for future literature to move from the ‘accounting for people' approach to an ‘accounting with people' approach to really give a voice to humans, and outline the potential of dialogic HC accounts for achieving that aim.

Keywords: Human Capital; Literature Review; Dialogic Accounting; Critical Accounting; Accounting For People (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-hme and nep-hpe
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03889478v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in European Accounting Review, 2022, ⟨10.1080/09638180.2022.2052922⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03889478

DOI: 10.1080/09638180.2022.2052922

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