Impression management and retrospective sense-making in corporate narratives: A social psychology perspective AbstractPurpose -Prior accounting research views impression management predominantly though the lens of economics. Drawing on social psychology research we provide an alternative perspective on corporate annual narrative reporting as characterised by conditions of 'ex post accountability' (Aerts, 2005, p. 497). These give rise to either (i) impression management resulting from the managerial anticipation of the feedback effects of information and/or to (ii) managerial sense-making by means of the retrospective framing of organisational outcomes. Design/methodology/approach -We use a content analysis approach pioneered by psychology research (Newman et al., 2003) which is based on the psychological dimension of word use to investigate the chairmen's statements of 93 UK listed companies. Findings -Results suggest that firms do not use chairmen's statements to present an inaccurate view of organisational outcomes (self-presentational dissimulation). We find that negative organisational outcomes prompt managers to engage in retrospective sense-making, rather than to present a public image of organisational performance inconsistent with the view internally held by management (selfpresentational dissimulation). Further, managers of large firms use chairmen's statements to portray an accurate (i.e., consistent with organisational performance as reported in the financial statements), albeit favourable, image of the firm and of organisational outcomes (i.e., impression management by means of enhancement).Research limitations -The content analysis approach adopted in the study analyses words out of context. Practical implications -Corporate annual reporting may not only be understood from a behavioural perspective involving managers responding to objectively determined stimuli inherent in the accountability framework, but also from a symbolic interaction perspective which involves managers retrospectively making sense of organisational outcomes and events. Originality/value -Our approach allows us to investigate three complementary scenarios of managerial corporate annual reporting behaviour: (i) self-presentational dissimulation (i.e., presenting an inaccurate view of organisational outcomes), (ii) impression management by means of enhancement (i.e., presenting an accurate, but favourable view of organisational outcomes), and (iii) retrospective sense-making.

Among these three papers, two are published in this special section, i.e. Albu et al. (2021) and Quagli et al. (2021), and the third one was published in an earlier separate issue, i.e. Duru et al. (2020), but edited as part of this special section.

This paper reports on an analysis of accounting policy choices made by European companies with an international shareholding. The accounting policies analysed in depth in this paper comprise the treatment of goodwill and accounting for deferred taxation. In the paper, the van der Tas comparability index is developed by separating the index into two components relating to the within-country (intra-national) effects of domestic standardisation and the between-country (inter-national) effects of harmonisation. It is shown in this paper that the value of the index may be interpreted as the probability that two companies selected at random will report financial information that is comparable, and that the lowest level of comparability exists when the accounting methods are assumed to be distributed equiprobably over the companies, the outcome of a random selection of accounting policies. The paper also considers the problems of non-disclosure, and a comprehensive 'disclosure-adjusted' comparability index is proposed.

This study assesses the extent of accounting harmony in Europe prior to the recent switch to IFRS, by presuming that accounting is harmonized when 'all firms operating in similar circumstances adopt the same accounting treatment for similar transactions regardless of their domicile'. The policies studied concern inventory, depreciation and goodwill, and the odds of using alternative accounting methods are predicted by logistic regression. The empirical results suggest that, while international exposure and firm size are significant factors, country effects are considerably greater than sector effects, which is inconsistent with harmonized accounting.

This study examines international differences in the asymmetric timeliness of accounting earnings by modelling international exposure to different jurisdictions as a firm-specific effect, using an index of regulatory complexity that relates to conditions in each of the capital markets in which the firm's equity is listed. The companies investigated are those with shares cross-listed on European stock exchanges, some of which are also listed in New York. Variation across jurisdictions and markets with respect to earnings timeliness and conservatism can be explained in part as an interaction of market effects and regulatory effects, with some evidence of opposition between the two, and the sensitivity of earnings to stock price changes shows a common, converging trend towards greater accounting conservatism in Europe. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2004.