Dealing with the theoretical and paradigmatic attempts to explicate accounting practices, this text provides a social legitimization of the discipline and profession of accounting. The theories and paradigms included cover the traditional, regulatory and research-based approaches to the construction of an accounting theory - a conceptual framework for accounting, the future scope of accounting - and to the explication of accounting as a paradigm-based social science. This new edition has been revised and updated to incorporate recent advances and paradigms covered in the research literature in the late 1990s.