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This article critiques “middle‐of‐the‐road” approaches to corporate social reporting and their cautions against radicalising the subject. The historicity of the concept of middle ground is challenged philosophically, politically and socially, by suggesting that its foundations reside in relativism, quietism and pluralism. A counter‐theory is proposed: that the middle ground is a contested terrain that shifts over time with social struggles and conflicts. This proposition is supported by a periodisation analysis of five theoretical themes or trends in the last 30 years of US social responsibility accounting: the Brilovian Critique, the Caring Society Critique, the Caring Market Critique, the Market Re‐regulation Critique, and the Radical Critique. Even if adherence to the middle ground is deemed desirable, it requires a social analysis of the concrete circumstances of each period – today′s middle ground cannot be extrapolated into the future.

This article examines the construction of systems of meaning at two levels: the writing of the history of the corporation; and the role of annual reports in constructing a system of meaning about the experiences of individual corporations.We argue that the transaction cost explanation of corporate history, which stresses the formative roles of technological and market forces, and management's quest for efficiency, serves to legitimate the modern corporate form and oligopolistic market structures. We provide an alternative, critical framework, which emphasises the importance of conflict over the distribution of income and wealth to our understanding of the emergence of modern corporate structures, strategies and accounting information systems.This alternative approach is illustrated through the history of General Motors' (GM) relations with the US State. The annual reports of the company are used as the primary, although not exclusive, source of data. We show that these documents represent history and current events in a partisan manner that makes them weapons in distributional conflicts.

Critically examines the ways in which the boundaries of business ethics are being established within business schools, consulting firms and corporations. Contrasts this official discourse on ethics with an alternative, more socially informed, and potentially disruptive approach to the ethics of business.

Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other business disciplines. However, in large part, the debates in accounting history and management history, have moved in parallel but separate universes. The purpose of this study is therefore one of exploring not only critical accounting understandings that are significant for management history but also one of highlighting conceptual flaws that are common to the postmodernist literature in both accounting and management history.

Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions that have emerged in both accounting research and management history. In exploring the usage of Foucault’s ideas, this paper argues that an over-reliance on a set of Foucauldian concepts – governmentality, “disciplinary society,” neo-liberalism – that were never conceived with an eye to the problems of accounting and management has resulted in not only in the drawing of some very longbows from Foucault’s formulations but also misrepresentations of the French philosophers’ ideas.

Many, if not most, of the intellectual positions associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History – that knowledge is inherently subjective, that management involves exercising power at distance, that history is a social construct that is used to legitimate capitalism and management – were argued in the critical accounting literature long before Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) oft cited call. Indeed, the “call” for a “New Accounting History” issued by Miller et al. (1991) played a remarkably similar role to that made by Clark and Rowlinson in management and organizational studies more than a decade later.

This is the first study to explore the marked similarities between the critical accounting literature, most particularly that related to the “New Accounting History” and that associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History in management and organizational studies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the core meaning of critical research.

It begins by noting the frequent divergence between “Real” history (which always marches to its own beat) and academic reflection that often fails to follow the beat of a progressive drum. Indeed, rather than facilitating a productive historical movement, scholarship may, at times, window‐dress brutality. These questions are examined by drawing on pertinent literature in social theory and cultural analysis. This work cautions that only continuous, unconditional, self‐reflective criticism provides a navigational path between barbarism and enlightenment. It proposes harnessing our full repository of critical scholarship to renew ever‐relevant forms of praxis (This is not the same notion of “practical” that involves berating workers in suits and white shirts.)

Unfortunately, an examination of contemporary progressive accounting literature exposes fundamental departures from these standards for criticism; that many fields have lapsed into a form relativism, enabling highly conservative political agendas. This degeneration is instigated at the outset of research, through an inappropriate choice of initial object for analysis (or “root metaphor”).

To address the predicament, this paper proposes a greater self‐awareness in framing the initial starting point, using a procedure drawn from Hegel and Marx's dialectics. To “test’ this methodology, the paper examines four streams of progressive accounting research: professional (e.g. Brilovian) analysis, Foucauldian (culturalist) studies, ethnographic studies, and epistemic contributions.

Each review offers suggestions for a dialectical reconstruction of the original, including a revised initial starting point (object) for the analysis.

There has been little thought given in science to the impact of direct brain‐machine interfacing upon the future development of human consciousness. Even less thought has been given to the possibilities for both optimizing and thwarting development in the cyborg child. A neurocognitive model of the evolution of cyborg consciousness is summarized, and from this model grounded speculations are offered pertaining to the future development of the higher cognitive functions in the cyborg child. It will be shown that cybernetic implants are “multistable”; that is, the artificial intelligence (AI) component of the cyborg brain‐machine linkage may function to condition development along ideological lines (the brain conditioned by the “ideological chip”), or may operate to open up neurocognitive development to new and heretofore unrealized limits (the brain’s development optimized by the “guru programme”). Development of the cyborg child may be conditioned in the interests of ideological concerns, or may lead to a consciousness that easily transcends all forms of ideology. Application of the guru programme may foster the emergence of new levels of cognitive complexity and information processing (à la Piagetian and neo‐Piagetian theory) that in turn allows new strategies of adaptation previously beyond human comprehension. The ethical and regulatory problems raised by cyborg technologies are addressed.