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2.2 Previous Studies on Annual Reports“
The annual report is a comprehensive communication that has the potential to makecompany information easily and routinely available in a single document” (Hooks etal., 2002). This makes “the annual report much more than a financial report; insteadit is a multi-objective, multi-audience communication” (Anderson & Imperia, 1992).Over the years, studies of ARs are conducted in many different areas and most of them focus on the readability and self-serving attributional bias. Besides, linguistsalso pay attention to ARs and have conducted some research in this field.
Oversea studies on the readability of ARs can be dated back to the middle of20th century. Some scholars proposed that the intelligibility of information in ARs isdetermined by a parallel relationship constructed by the readability of themselvesand the information users’ ability to understand. Western scholars widely considerthat most of the financial information in ARs of listed companies does not projectreadability to consumers. The users’ cognitive degree of accounting information isfar behind the information presented in ARs. Without exception, studies in differentcountries at different times all draw to a same conclusion: basically ARs are “hard”or “very hard” to understand. (Courtis, 1998) Another view is proved by scholarsthat the language of ARs can be subjectively manipulated. It is related to the“gatekeeper theory” that the management team acts as the gate keeper to process theaccounting information. Management team tends to exaggerate the goodperformance and minimize the bad performance at the meanwhile. In this case,readability is one of the characteristics of ARs language design. Many studiesconcerns with the relationship between ARs readability and profitability ofcompanies. Adelberg (1979) took earning per share as a criterion to examine thisquestion and the result shows that they are perfectly correlation. However Jones(1988) made an opposite stance.
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CHAPTER THREE THEORECTICAL FRAMEWORK....................15
3.1 The Appraisal Theory....................15
3.1.1 Attitude System..................17
CHAPTER FOUR PROCEDURES AND DATAANALYSIS ............ 27
4.1 Data Collection.............. 27
4.2 Specific Procedures..................28
CHAPTER FIVE INTEGRATED ANALYSIS OF VISUAL-VERBIAGERESOURCES IN ANNUAL REPORTS........51
CHAPTER FIVEINTEGRATED ANALYSIS OF VISUAL- VERBIAGE RESOURCES INANNUAL REPORTS
In the above chapter, we have discussed the verbiage and visual resources separatelyunder a rather universal definition of interactive communtication. In this chapter, wewill analyze both verbiage and visual resources as a whole (what we defined asstudy object in the part of data collection) with the
