Editorial

Citation

Roslender, R. (2009), "Editorial", Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, Vol. 13 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrca.2009.31613daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, Volume 13, Issue 4

This has been an important year in the evolution of the Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, the fifth since it became an Emerald title in 2005. For the first time a volume containing four issues has been produced, a significant step forward since the two issues per year that characterised the journal’s formative years when it was published under the auspices of the Personnel Economic Institute at Stockholm Business School. Notable among this year’s issues was the collection of papers in memory of Jan-Erik Grojer, one of the journal’s founding collective in the mid-1990s. Further Special Issues will be a feature of the journal’s output in the years to come.

The journal’s international presence continues to expand. Of the 20 papers published in 2009, four each originate in the UK and Sweden, together with three from Denmark. There were also contributions from Spain, the USA, Australia, Malaysia, Poland and Hong Kong. To some degree, this mirrors the composition of the current editorial board. While Scandinavian representation remains high, both the UK and Australia are now strongly represented, including by the two newest members, Linda Lewis from Sheffield and John Dumay from Sydney. As a result, the journal is now in a very strong position to move forward to achieve the goal of being an internationally respected vehicle for high-quality research and scholarship produced by those working at the interface between accounting and finance and human resource management.

As was the case with the previous issue, two of the three refereed papers published here have a strong human resource management focus. The paper by Abdul-Halim, Che-Ha and Geare looks at the current fashion of outsourcing human resource activities and its relationship with a range of business strategies in the context of Malaysian manufacturing companies. They identify a significant relationship between outsourcing both traditional and transactional activities and proactive business strategies, combined with a negative relationship between breadth strategies and the outsourcing of traditional functions. Baraldi and Cifalino present the findings of an exploratory study of different performance measurement approaches to the introduction of new training programmes in five Italian healthcare organisations. They conclude that both operational and strategic approaches to performance measurement are feasible, particularly when used in a complementary manner.

The third refereed paper is on the intellectual capital topic and looks at disclosure of such information in 120 initial public offerings on the Japanese Stock Exchange in 2003. In so doing, Rimmel, Nielsen and Yosano extend the scope of this research field to an important knowledge society, and in so doing discovered that company age had a significant influence on the extent of such intellectual capital disclosures, but not the type of industry, company size or the extent of managerial ownership prior to an initial public offering.

In September of this year I was fortunate to share a platform with Baruch Lev and David Nicolini at the opening plenary session of the 32nd Convegno dell’Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale, held at the Universita Politecnica delle Marche in Ancona, Italy. The title of the plenary was “Untouchable or Intangible? Governing, Managing and Disclosing Intangibles in Modern Firms and Businesses”, which set the scene for the rest of event. There were in excess of 700 participants over the two days of the congress, including three members of the journal’s editorial board. While most of the presentations were made in Italian, there were also two parallel sessions in English, with presentations by researchers from Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK, as well three from Italian colleagues. The final paper in this issue was prepared especially for the event and is published here as a non-refereed item.

Robin Roslender