Much of the historical research in accounting continues to mimic idealized scientific methods in which written and official evidence is privileged. This research advances the narrative that the institutions of accountancy and major personalities are engaged in a heroic process of “progress”. Such a view ignores the impact of accounting on the lives of ordinary people. Thus, there is little understanding of the lived experiences of ordinary people who are affected by accounting and shape its development. This is in contrast to the currently dominant approaches to writing accounting history. Calls for the use of oral histories so that those marginalized and neglected by conventional history can be given a voice and problematize the narratives of “progress” dominating accounting research.

Historical research in accounting has recently expanded to include studies of race, gender, and class and their impact on accounting. Building on Lehman's gender research (1992), recent work includes studies of the exclusion of Spanish women, African Americans, Maori women, and black South Africans from the practice of public accountancy and the marginalisation and deskilling of working-class accounting positions in the UK. Analyses have been conducted examining the role of the British profession in forestalling indigenisation in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Kenya. This research on the accounting profession, in turn, has led to research on the impact of accounting practices on oppressed groups. While this widening of research areas is a welcome change, this article calls for more explicitly political motivations for historical accounting research and an ever-present focus on how this research can help ameliorate current oppressive conditions in which accounting plays a role.

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insurance benefits in 1992, up 10 per cent from 1991, while an estimated 37 million citizens are uninsured.Discussion of health care costs has expanded beyond the technical domain of accounting and entered the realm of public discourse. The alarming accounts of soaring health care costs cited above are not taken from obscure ledgers or technical reports, but rather from the pages of The New York Times (NYT), one of the nation's leading daily newspapers. The objective of this article is to analyse this contemporary social discourse on the accounting category, "health care cost".To examine the discourse on health care costs, we collected all the stories printed in The New York Times between 1 April 1992 and 1 May 1993 which contained the phrase "health care costs". A search of the NEXIS database over this one-year time period identified 254 stories containing the phrase. These 254 stories form the text for the discourse analysis.The study draws on the work of Russian linguist V.N. Volos ∨ inov (1973) who developed the first semiotic theory of ideology, initiating a branch of discourse

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