ABSTRACT
This chapter promotes and illustrates accounting history reflecting a critical theoretical approach. The particular approach, reflecting our work, is developed through engagement with postmodern, post-structuralist and post-Marxist orientation in theorising in the social sciences and humanities. The illustrative focuses are substantively writings on accounting by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and accounting's actual mobilisation by socialistic agitators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gallhofer and Haslam elaborate accounting's mobilisation in relation to a relatively repressed social body by focusing on Bentham's general articulation of accounting for wellbeing, social progress, and socialistic and labour campaigns, giving some emphasis to the position of women in the workforce. In this chapter, they have reviewed a number of critical historical studies that have attempted to advance emancipation in and through accounting and furnish analyses of accounting's mobilisation and location in projects of radical activism with emancipatory intent.
