ABSTRACT
Critical accounting research constitutes a very diverse body of scholarship which is underpinned by a broad range of philosophical schools of thought. One of the most recent streams of research to emerge and attract increasing attention is that informed by critical realism. Even though a pronounced element of realism has long prevailed in many bodies of critical accounting research, especially those informed by various strands of Marxist thought, critical realism offers a distinct alternative to more conventional forms of empirical realism characterised by a view of the world as independent of perceiving subjects. Originating in the pioneering works of Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1979), critical realism has increasingly come to be seen as a means of transcending the divide between such empirical realism and more extreme variants of postmodernist thought, underpinned by a strongly social constructivist position. As a philosophical school of thought, it has exercised significant influence on such disciplines as sociology (e.g. Archer, 1995; Sayer, 2000), economics (e.g. Lawson, 1997; Downward and Mearman, 2007), political science (e.g. Joseph, 2002a) and organisation studies (e.g. Fleetwood and Ackroyd, 2004; Reed, 2009), from which accounting scholars tend to draw inspiration. Its influence on the accounting literature has hitherto been relatively marginal, however, and it is only recently that it has begun to gather momentum as a philosophical foundation for critical accounting scholarship with a clearly articulated emancipatory intent (see Modell, 2015a, 2017).
