Images, language and numbers in company reports: a study of documents that are occasioned by a legal requirement for financial disclosure

Abstract

The substantive area of this article is Annual Company Reports. These comprise documents that are in the public domain. For our purposes, they are an example of what is termed in the methodological literature ‘unobtrusive methods’. Company Reports are assembled from numerical, textual and visual content. This article examines certain developments within Annual Company Reports; namely, the increasing extension beyond the legal requirement for numerical financial disclosure. An extension that often includes upbeat textual descriptions of the organization, and expansion into the domain of visual representations, images and graphs. The article considers aspects of the analytical and accountable status of the visual and textual discretionary additions within Company Reports. It also addresses certain practical implications of designing Company Reports for a non-homogenous audience.