ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to two generic ways of seeing within the broader designation of Marxist perspectives that have been widely subscribed to within critical accounting research: the political economy perspective and the labour process perspective. The scope of the chapter has been restricted to the years between the later 1970s, when critical accounting first began to be fashioned by a relatively small number of scholars, and 2000, by which time much of the legacy of this particular genre of critical accounting research had been firmly established. Subsequent contributions from within this tradition are identified elsewhere in this volume. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to recognise that during the middle 1980s the political economy and labour process perspectives were arguably at their most fashionable, that is for those in the vanguard of driving critical accounting research forward. In this regard they can be understood to have displaced interpretivist perspectives whose heyday was a couple of years previous to this. Equally, the dominance of the former two ways of seeing was soon to be challenged by Critical Theory, a third generic Marxist perspective that has continued to flourish to the present day, and at least as strongly. It is therefore no coincidence that interpretivism and Critical Theory provide the previous and subsequent chapters within this volume. Taken together they framed the greater part of the critical accounting literature in the 1980s, thereafter sharing this role with a growing range of alternative ways of seeing whose critical credentials continue to be hotly debated.
