Track 4: Health and management control
Chaired by Professor Ulf Johanson, Mälardalen University, Sweden (ulf.johanson@mdh.se), Professor Guy Ahonen, Swedish School of Economics, Finland (guy.ahonen@hanken.fi), and Professor Robin Roslender, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland (r.roslender@hw.ac.uk)
| Workplace health is a growing concern all over the world. In addition to the problems attendant on the tendency to an ageing population, in the 1990s workplace health became a serious and subsequently a high priority issue in many countries. Dramatically escalating rates of absence from work caused serious problems not only for the individual employee but also for employers, unions and governments. Levels of efficiency have been reduced and quality of service has suffered. All these have had significant financial consequences for all parties. |
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Of necessity, a range of initiatives designed to reduce the problem of workplace health have been explored by both government and policy makers, as well as by employers, unions and elements of the academic research community.
It is in this context that some researchers have begun to consider whether it might be possible to develop management control
and accounting models that address workplace health problems. Management control and accounting has traditionally focused on more
tangible determinants of employee efficiency such as identifying the most beneficial utilisation of labour inputs (decision making)
and ensuring that these are realised in practice (planning and control), which taken together maximise value added or delivered. Until
comparatively recently, intangible resource issues associated with employee competence, customer relationships and knowledge networks
have attracted only minimal attention from management accounting and control specialists. Health as a valuable organisational resource,
and the issues associated with its reduced availability, are further examples of problems normally considered in other arenas within the
enterprise than the management control and accounting function.
The principal aim of this track is to investigate whether it is possible to extend further the boundaries of accounting in the
intangibles (or intellectual capital) field to incorporate health issues. The objective of such an exercise is to modify existing
management control systems and processes so as to encourage attention, discussions, decision making and action with respect to
sustainable health promotion. At the very least, putting such issues on the management control and accounting agenda will influence
'talk' as a necessary precursor to desirable long term organisational change.
In order to successfully develop any such new approaches, we believe that there is a strong need to promote multidisciplinary enquiry
involving researchers from not only management control and accounting but also the human resource management, public health and
occupational safety and health disciplines. The contributors to the proposed track, therefore, represent a number of different academic
disciplines as well as countries.
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Mälardalens University is the first University in the world
to become enviromentally certified according to the
international standard ISO 14001.
