Background & purpose
The history of human resource accounting goes back to the 1960s. It was during this century the basic research started where they tried to develop and evaluate if it would be possible to measure certain values and costing of the human capital in companies in the future. In present time the annual report that companies make contains one part that is statutory and one part that is optional. Our focus will be to study human resource accounting and the obligatory accounting of sickness by the employees during a period of seven years. This paper is based on a proposition from the government which was written in 2002 and accepted in July 2003. Our purpose is to describe if there will be any kind of similarity with the different industries accounting of human resource accounting in the annual reports. Our study will be based on a institutional perspective. This perspective is the most useful for our study where we are going to search for similarity between the different industries.
Method
In the beginning part of the paper we started by reading literature and articles written by well known authors in the subject of human resource accounting. We are going to gather information from four different companies’ annual reports in a period of seven years. To analyze if some isomorphism will be seen, we will make our own matrix that will work as a type of checklist.
Result
When the new law had been established for a couple of years we made a discovery that similarity between the companies arose. This we think is an effect from the imitating isomorphism, this is based on companies interest in other companies way of doing their accounting. They will then get inspired and perhaps do their own accounting in the same way.
The human capital did not have very much space in the annual reports in the beginning of our study. But the information tended to increase in the annual reports during the last period of our study, possibly because the subject has become more popular and the employees are getting more worth.