Human Resource Accounting is Social Accounting: A Managerial Reappraisal *

Abstract

It has often been argued that social accounting has been a new dimension of the science of accounting. This paper shows that social accounting has been a natural development of human resource accounting. It examines, therefore, the societal utilisation of corporate human resources from an accounting point of view; it describes the underutilised so far concept of human capital budgeting; it analyses the major problems (of social, mainly, nature) in implementing human resource accounting systems and eventually it synthesizes all the above towards a revival of human resource accounting interest for a more managerial utilisation of its recent developments.