The real reason behind the recent emphasis on human capital discussions in Japan seems to be the society’s concern about a strong orientation for stockholders’ interests among large Japanese companies.
These large Japanese firms have been increasing dividend payments to stockholders on a considerable scale and have relatively neglected wage payments to employees. Furthermore, the firms have been suppressing capital investment for a long time. This could lead to no meaningful growth perspective for Japanese firms.
We have to pay serious attention to the duality of money and people as the essential elements of the composition of the firm as an economic organization.

This paper aims to reexamine human capital from the perspective of accounting and finance. To this end, firstly, the paper clarifies the concept of human capital accounting and explicitly distinguishes “human assets” from “employee equity” on the balance sheet (BS). Secondly, it discusses an example of human assets recorded in the BS. The “player’s registration right” of a soccer team is an example of a human asset measured on an individual basis. As for human assets measured by an organization,“ development assets” in R&D activities are discussed. Lastly, turning to the credit side of the BS, the paper introduces the concepts of multistakeholder BS, “employee cost of capital” and the multi-stakeholder weighted average cost of capital (WACC) and presents an image of a future company.

There has been significant progress in empirical research on human capital theory in economics lately. However, human capital theory needs to be better understood by researchers and policymakers who are not labor economists. This paper summarizes the critical implications of human capital theory and reviews areas where research has advanced in recent years. It focuses on two areas of research findings, in particular, that have valuable implications for management: quantifying the human capital of managers and executives and the growing importance of social skills. These studies provide critical perspectives for understanding the mechanisms to determine firm productivity. Finally, the paper includes the author’s personal view on topics that require further research accumulation in the future.

Drawing from a literature review of strategic human resource management (SHRM) research with a focus on human capital concepts, this paper aims to identify issues in existing research and discuss future research directions. Specifically, the paper clarifies that in prior SHRM research based on the shareholder value model, the discussion of human capital has been limited to a more narrowly-defined “cognitive KSAOs.” Furthermore, the paper proposes that under the sustainability paradigm, which emphasizes value enhancement in economic, social and environmental aspects, it is essential to focus on new human capital components, including “non-cognitive KSAOs” and their interaction with the existing cognitive KSAOs.

This paper focuses on how entrepreneurs’ emotions affect the decision to select their alliance partner. In the prior research, the complementarity of resources and skills, the similarity of the knowledge base to enhance the absorption capacity, and the prominence of the partner company have been discussed as the main selection criteria. In this research, we collected data through semi-structured interviews with 50 CEOs and officers of 41 entrepreneurial startup firms and conducted an analysis based on the Gioia methodology. We found that the entrepreneurs’ emotions arising from recognizing the attitudes and traits of the partner,“ self-esteem” and “empathy through similarity” influenced their decisions on partner selection. Additionally, the paper points out the asymmetry in the views of startups and existing firms. Our analysis result led to a discussion of the sources of asymmetry in open innovation.

While talent management (TM) and strategic human resource management (SHRM) have similarities in improving organizational performance by managing employees effectively, their differences remain unclear. This paper employs bibliometric techniques to detect conceptual boundaries between TM and SHRM. We collected bibliographic data from 1,662 English academic papers from Scopus for analysis. Our analysis indicates that TM has a micro-focus on “managing pivotal employees effectively,” while SHRM considers a more macro view of the “relationship among strategy, HRM practices, and performance.” The results suggest that we should pursue research in talent management that leverages the differences in focus and perspective.

Errata:
Organizational Science, 56(4):31. The equation in line 9-10 of right column.
(Error) This indicates that the larger the university, the fewer the number of license agreements when an external-integrated TTO is used, which is the opposite of Hypothesis 2.
(Correction) This indicates that the larger the university, the more the number of license agreements when an external-integrated TTO is used, which is the opposite of Hypothesis 2.