Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to “Analysing accounting discourse: avoiding the ‘fallacy of internalism’”, an article by Ferguson in which a work by Gallhofer et al. is critiqued. Design/methodology/approach – The paper responds to critique by Ferguson that one of their papers does not consider the “social-historical contexts of text production, transmission and reception”. It also looks at Ferguson's challenge of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and its political motivation. Findings – The paper defends Gallhofer et al. in that they chose to “promote critical discourse analysis respecting the focus of accounting and finance” and that the aim of their work was pedagogical. They chose to focus on the production of the texts rather than their reception because the work wanted to gain insights into how accounting texts are read and mobilised by radical activists in pursuance of their emancipatory goals, especially through CDA. Originality/value – The paper provides a defence of a previous paper of the authors, which was concerned with emancipatory change, evident in Fairclough's version of CDA.