Moving from Accounting for People to Accounting with People: A Critical Analysis of the Literature and Avenues for Research
批判性回顾过去五十年“为人们核算”文献，指出其被经济目标主导、将人商品化的问题，提出转向“与人们一起核算”的对话式会计路径，以真正赋予人话语权。
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.