The Annual Report: an Interdisciplinary Approach to a ‘Contaminated’ New Genre, Paper n. 109 del Dipartimento di Economia Aziendale, Università degli Studi di Brescia

Business reporting is far more than producing accounts and a few supporting explanations. Indeed, ARs still contain the accounting statements and other technical and regulatory information, but this information is only just one small part of a very much larger story. They have become a key way of projecting a self-image – a way of portraying the corporate personality and, most importantly, a way of delivering both implicit and explicit messages. In many ways, an AR is ‘the company’. It is the corporate voice delivering corporate messages not only to shareholders and debenture-holders but also to the wider world, including potential investors, employees and the general public.
In this particularly rich and varied context, both accounting and linguistics have an important role to play and it seems not unreasonable to say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the two dimensions add great value to each other. As linguists, we could not even consider working on a text type such as ARs - that are so massive, so relevant and socially and economically relevant - alone. An accountant would ask a linguist for help and, similarly, a linguist could not even dream of understanding such a complex text and context without the help of an accountant.