Genre Analysis of Corporate Annual Report Narratives: A Corpus Linguistics-Based Approach

Rutherford, Brian A.

doi:10.1177/0021943605279244

Cited by 222 publications

(193 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(37 reference statements)

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“…The pressure stems from multiple sources, including regulatory bodies, the market and market actors, and the internal environment of the firm. The accounting narrative is the part of the firm's public disclosure to stakeholders, which uses of text and images to convey information about the company (Clatworthy and Jones, 2003;Rutherford, 2005;Beattie, 2014) by presenting a true and fair view of its standings. Accounting narratives 4 can be seen as a key format where organizations account for their activities to maintain legitimacy.…”

Section: That Helps Researchers and Practitioners Understand A Selectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of corporate visual selfrepresentation in accounting narratives

Eriksson¹

2017

Dissertation From the Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology (MIT). Licentiate Theses

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This dissertation deals with firms' visual and pre-visual self-representations in accounting narratives.Self-representations are those descriptions about the company that firms include in accounting narratives to convey the current standings and their identity. External stakeholders increasingly expect non-numerical information about firms to be disclosed, and accounting narratives are a key medium for firms to account for their activities and maintain legitimacy as social actors. The question of which reporting conventions exist for legitimating self-representations, especially from a visual perspective, remains unexplored. The purpose of this study is therefore to explore the empirical phenomenon of self-representations in accounting narratives in relation to legitimation rhetoric.The study is based on three research papers dealing with different patterns of self-representations in accounting-related narratives, including corporate reporting and business model diagrams. The examples are viewed through the theoretical lenses of semiotics and institutional theory, particularly legitimation theory. The study combines visual methods (visual content analysis and visual taxonomy) with other methods (interviews, text analysis) to conceptualize and exemplify what is meant by self-representations in accounting narratives. The study finds that there may be multiple parallel pre-visual self-representations at play to influence representations of the self, that visual selfrepresentations are becoming more common in accounting narratives, and that several rhetorical strategies for legitimation are observable in these representations. By showing how diagrams can serve a legitimating purpose in accounting narratives, it is argued that diagrams should be considered on par with graphs and photographs as visual rhetorical devices in accounting narratives, and that they could be used as key communicative elements in the accounting process.Second, based on the longitudinal and comparative examples of self-representations, it is suggested that self-representations increasingly refer to abstract rather than concrete referents. This change is discussed in terms of the increasingly digital and service-based knowledge economy, where material referents give way to "amaterial" values. The contribution of this study is to describe selfrepresentations through several empirical examples, and to thereby increase awareness among practitioners and researchers of how visuals serve as communicative resources with legitimating functions in accounting narratives. Four concepts are proposed as tools for explaining the observed developments, and for improving visual literacy with regard to accounting narratives: inclusive perspective on accounting narratives, amateriality, self-representation, and diagrams. Keywords: visual research, self-representation, diagrams, accounting narrative, corporate reporting, public disclosure, business models, semiotics, annual report, Ericsson Sammanfattning Denna licentiatavhandling handlar om företags visu...

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Section: That Helps Researchers and Practitioners Understand A Selectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of corporate visual selfrepresentation in accounting narratives

Eriksson¹

2017

Dissertation From the Swedish Research School of Management and Information Technology (MIT). Licentiate Theses

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“…There is a "… 'grand narrative of progress' that is inherent within mainstream accounts of strategy …" (Grandy & Mills, 2004: 1157-1158. This optimistic element of strategy discourse can function Electronic Submission ID: 16601 in strategists' accounts of their stewardship of organizations, evidenced, for example, in the 'Pollyanna effect' in company reports following disappointing company performance (Rutherford, 2005) and in the positivity characteristic of the genre (Cornut et al, 2012).…”

Section: Characteristics Of Strategy Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

The Power of Words in Tension: Enterprise/Strategy as a Dilemma in Neo-liberalism's Persistence

O'Rourke¹

2014

AMPROC

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“…Their main finding was that negative words in the financial press forecasted low firm earnings. Rutherford(2005) used word frequencies to identify genre rules in U.K. Operating and Financial Reviews.…”

Section: The Accounting Lexiconmentioning

confidence: 99%