Few managers deny the value to an organization of its human resources. Many managers, however, tend to look on human resources as an unfortunately necessary evil. If they can rid the organization of such a dependency through automation, they will do that at almost any cost. Many more managers seek the commodification of human resources. These managers tend to embrace the worst aspects of the process of globalization through the proverbial race to the bottom in relation to worker compensation.
Your comment appears to focus on the formal recognition in financial statements of only the highly qualified, most valuable of an organization's human resources. This focus is consistent with much of the literature on the subject because it is somewhat more easily discussed as the conceptual level. Stittle (2004) emphasized the importance of this issue when he contended that a major transition is occurring that involves a shift in emphasis from a reliance on economic capital to a reliance on intellectual capital. A slight disconnect occurs at this point because the focus of the human resources accounting initiative is to apply economic values to intellectual capital, as well as to place these quantified values into the financial statements of an enterprise. Stittle (2004) lamented that, "reporting structures have failed to evolve to capture the extent and value of this form of capital" (p. 311). Roslender and Fincham (2004) raised the issues of (a) how such capital should be values and (b) who would control the process of valuation and reporting. Roslender and Fincham (2004) stated further that the human resource accounting initiative failed because proponents did not "generate an acceptable means" of valuation and reporting (p. 3).
The value of highly trained individuals to an organziation may be able to be determined with some degree of accuracy. The value of these individuals exists, however, only so long as they ar...