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The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of social accounting at the micro level and examines the use of social reporting for constructive purposes through internal communication devices. It explores the discourse adopted by a large organisation in social accounting and reporting (workplace flexibility) through employee newsletters. In doing so the paper seeks to answer two research questions. First, what workplace flexibility practices are evident in the employee newsletters? Second, do management use discourse (including self-accounts) in newsletters for self-serving management control purposes or for the emancipatory purposes of benefiting employees?

Content and discourse analysis are used to examine “workplace flexibility” practices portrayed within the newsletters. This study explores the discourse adopted by a large Australian financial institution, in its social accounting disclosure in employee newsletters. It does so by examining the discourse adopted by the organisation in relation to one aspect of social accounting, that is, “workplace flexibility” in the employee newsletters over the period 2003-2007.

The paper finds the financial institution used its internal newsletters to influence employee attitude and behaviour, not as claimed for social “betterment” – justice, welfare, emancipation. The possibility of social accounting's emancipatory potential was suppressed by those responsible for providing the accounts. The paper found that management used discourse (including self-accounts) in the newsletters for self-serving management control purposes and not as claimed for benefiting employees.

The idea that the organisation provides workplace flexibility for the sake of benefitting employees is questionable. The discourse found in the newsletters suggests that flexible work options instead appear to be aimed at garnering employee loyalty, with subsequent employer benefits of improved organisational performance. The organisation used the discourse on workplace flexibility to blur the boundaries of work and life and persuade the employees to work harder and longer, to continuously increase productivity. In doing so, the organisation camouflaged its own economic sustainability and profitability as workplace flexibility.

This paper aims to understand how managers in an Australian financial institution coordinated different organisational actions for the management of the work health of employees, by adopting “work‐life balance” initiatives.

The paper uses a narrative approach to analyse various internal and external documents and has also collected “self‐accounts” of employees.

It was found that management used “work‐life balance” initiatives to manage both the physical and emotional health of employees. Management's main focus was on community volunteering, which was satisfying for employees, but also of significant benefit to the organisation in terms of marketing and branding. Thus, management was able to use these initiatives to motivate employees to work towards organisational goals.

The paper contributes to the developing literature on human competence accounting by using employee “self‐accounts” to compare with organisational statements in relation to worker health.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of approaches to measuring and reporting on intangibles since the mid‐1990s, and to identify intellectual capital self‐accounts as a possible means of continuing this process in a beneficial way.

Principally a literature review, the paper provides the opportunity to extend earlier, initial thoughts on the promise of intellectual capital self‐accounts.

Given the importance of primary intellectual capital (“people”) in the creation of intangibles (secondary intellectual capital), the paper draws attention to the limited role hitherto ascribed to people in reporting on intangibles in particular.

The value of the paper lies principally in the identification of possible content for self‐accounts in the context of brands and health and wellbeing as important intangibles.

This paper explores why and how, and in what context, individuals' accounting of self, ethics and morality and self-knowledge of the limits of accountability can frame their account giving and judging in an organisational formal performance evaluation process.

Building upon the Butlerian notions of accountability as advanced by Messner (2009) and Roberts (2009), the authors conducted a qualitative field study at a Vietnamese public university, involving face-to-face interviews, observation of performance evaluation meetings and examination of archival documents.

The authors found that individuals experience conflicting ethical and moral values when they rely on their self-knowledge of accountability (the ability to self-account) in their account giving and judging in the university's formal academic performance evaluation process. In addition, the authors found that when individuals want to provide the best account to the account demander, their understanding of their ability to self-account and the formal organisational accountability process influence their views on what authentic account giving means. As a result, enhanced ethics-to-others has the potential to be an ethical burden and may not lead to authentic or beyond minimum accounting of “self”. Yet, in the Vietnamese socio-cultural and political context within which the university operates, and in the situation of ethical and moral conflicts in self-accountability, the authors found evidence of individuals' self-accountability behaviours that is based on the co-existence of a sense of responsibility to others and self-knowledge of the limits of accountability.

Although this study was limited to one Vietnamese public university, its findings enhance the knowledge about how individual ethical and moral values, self-knowledge of the limits of accountability and the formal organisational accountability process connect with each other in the socio-cultural and political context within which an organisation operates.

The study highlights the role of the context of local socio-cultural norms and values and of physical social interaction in developing the sense of connection to others, which influences the way individuals' ethical and moral values are mobilised to shape account-giving and judging behaviours.

The emphasis on the role of the sense of connection to others on personal accountability and the emphasis on physical, face-to-face interaction in developing sense of connection to others leads to an interesting issue regarding the sense of connection in the virtual social interaction setting, which has become increasingly popular globally, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and its implication for the use of personal ethical and moral values in organisational accountability practices.

Adding to the conversation on how a formal organisational accountability process can be effective, this study identified (1) the unpredictable outcomes of using ethics as rules for accountability practices due to potentially conflicting ethical values; (2) the diverse understandings of self-accounting, leading to different ideas of authentic accounting; and (3) the possibility of moral accountability behaviours based on the co-existence of a sense of connection to others and an understanding of the limits of accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the case for taking employee health and wellbeing into account in some way and to consider a range of objections that might be raised against such exercises.

The paper identifies the existence of a persistent sickness absence as a cause for concern for a range of stakeholders and how it might be accounted for in the light of recent developments within the intellectual capital field. Attention then turns to some of the difficulties such well meaning interventions might encounter, and briefly considers how a self‐accounting approach might in some part overcome these.

The paper finds that a programme of empirical research within the field of employee health and wellbeing is now required to ensure that employee health and wellbeing into account.

While predominantly a discursive contribution to the literature, the paper incorporates some discussion of innovative accounting interventions.

In contrast to viewing sickness absence from a cost perspective, the paper encourages stakeholders to embrace a wider spectrum of ways of seeing to better understand employee health and wellbeing issues in the work place.

The purpose of this paper is to identify employee wellness as a further component of intellectual capital and to illustrate how it might be possible to account for it in ways that depart from accounting's traditional focus on costs and valuations.

The paper is discursive in approach, considering a range of ideas relevant to visualising employee wellness as intellectual capital and how to account for it as such.

Employee wellness a component of primary intellectual capital, being something that employees bring to their organisations together with their experience, expertise, know‐how, leadership skills, creativity, etc. It is also a component of secondary intellectual capital envisaged as initiatives designed to promote greater levels of health and fitness among employees. While it is not possible to place financial valuations on employee wellness, individual or collectively, it is possible to develop metrics that will communicate useful information to a variety of stakeholders. In addition, employee wellness is a suitable topic for the development of self accounts by organisational participants.

The paper is an early contribution to a new field of enquiry and seeks to encourage further studies both empirical and conceptual.

With the improvement of consumers' health consciousness, healthy food has attracted great attention in daily consumption. Previous research into the sense of power often distinguishes it into high and low level, ignoring the impact of different construal of power on consumption behaviors. This article divides power into dual construal (responsibility vs opportunity) and aims to examine the differential impacts of the construal of power on healthy food preference.

Two pretests and three formal experiments were conducted to examine the effect of the construal of power on the consumer's healthy food preference, the mediation of self-discipline perception and the moderation of the relative strength of prevention over promotion focus (i.e. RSPPF).

Results indicate that individuals who construe power as responsibility (vs opportunity) exhibit higher self-discipline perception, which in turn leads to greater healthy food preference. However, the main effect above can be weakened among the low-power group. Moreover, the above mediating effect of self-discipline perception is stronger for individuals with higher RSPPF.

First, based on the binary-construal perspective, this study refines the classification of high power and introduces it into the antecedent research of healthy food preference. Second, this paper reveals the self-discipline perception as the inner mechanism underlying the effect of the construal of power on healthy food preference, while RSPPF as the boundary condition for this mediating mechanism. Moreover, this research also provides practical implications for healthy food enterprises that the construal of power, self-discipline perception and regulatory focus should be taken into consideration in advertising design and healthy product promotion.

The involvement of accounting in imperial expansion in the South Pacific during the mid‐nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century is critically analysed. Through a study of archival data, it examines the way in which the practice of accounting became involved in the production of a calculative knowledge of imperialism. In particular, it explores: (a) the processes through which an indigenous Fijian élitist structure was transformed into a British instrument of domination and control; (b) the way in which accounting calculations and explanations were imposed upon the indigenous chiefs; and (c) the way in which accounting, once imposed, was used as an integral part of imperial policies and activities for Empire expansion. The study highlights that before annexation what was previously seen to be just a question of an “American debt” came to be seen as requiring formal imperial intervention. During formal imperial rule, however, British reaction to indigenous resistance to accounting‐based administration was managed through a bargaining policy. This change enabled high chiefs to enjoy a “special immunity” through accounting’s negotiable interpretations, interrelationships and explanations. Accounting as a financial and an administrative system of accountability thus became an integral part of a British‐imposed collaborative system of imperialism.

The assessment and management of risk is central to contemporary mental health practice. The emergence of recovery has contributed to demands for more service user centred approaches to risk. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of narrative as a framework for understanding risk and safety in mental health care.

Narrative theory is adopted to structure a debate examining the potential role of a narrative approach to risk assessment and inform future practice.

There is a danger that even within services, people with mental health problems are understood in terms of their riskiness perpetuating an image of service users as “dangerous others”. This is confounded by a disconnection with individual context in the risk assessment process. Narrative centralizes the persons’ subjective experience and provides a contemporaneous self-account of their identity. This situates risk within a context and creates possibility for greater understanding of coping, strengths and resilience.

There has been a call for new ways of working with risk in mental health which facilitate safety and recovery. There is limited examination of what this might actually look like. This paper presents narrative as an approach that may achieve these aims.

The intellectual capital (IC) paradigm appears to be stuck at a crossroads of relevance. This paper aims to explore a way forward by examining the power of IC narratives. The prevailing use of narrative as an explanation for the reasons underpinning an organisation's management of IC is too narrow since narrative can have an emancipatory impact. This enhanced view of narrative allows the opportunity to explore how narrative may be used to understand and mobilise IC both inside and outside organisations and thus improve its relevance as a working discipline.

An analysis of three case studies is presented, each offering different insights on the emancipatory potential of IC narratives.

In order to progress IC beyond the crossroads of relevance, organisations should not blindly implement “frameworks” or “guidelines” that seek to measure and control IC as if it were any other asset (or liability). Instead organisations may benefit from considering how the development of IC fits with the strategic intent of the organisation and be proactive, thinking beyond “accepted” practice to create new insights through critical reflection.

The paper is novel because it extends the understanding of how IC can be utilised by providing exemplars of a failed IC implementation as well as two cases where the implementation of IC has brought benefits. Thus, we see IC in action, rather than from a distance.