A thousand words?

Citation

Evans, S. (2013), "A thousand words?", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 26 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/aaaj.2013.05926daa.001

A thousand words?

Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 26, Issue 4

In this issue, I want to spend a while thinking about how we tell stories, specifically, via annual reports. One of my teaching areas is Creative Nonfiction, involving the study of writing techniques that are normally associated with producing fiction, such as structural and stylistic choices that engage readers in a more dramatic way, though without distorting critical information. What does this have in common with business reporting?

You do not have to be a genius to realize that an annual report comprises more than its text. One would expect the combination of text and visual elements would be engineered to create as pleasing an effect as possible, even when the business performance news is not so good. It is hardly surprising considering that public relations and marketing minds are still busily fussing around the edges of reporting that arises from accounting standards in this situation, after all. But there is more.

To begin with, there are a number of attributes of the report as a design object that can arguably affect the reader’s response. This strikes the reader before any kind of word-work they undertake, and may begin with the weight and texture of the report. The feel of the paper matters, for instance. Remember those environmentally conscious recycled-paper versions that eschewed all gloss? Whether in print or on a screen, readers do register whether pages are crowded too, so the size of the margins is part of the package of deliberate design choices made to aid achievement of the desired effect. These are issues for any publication.

Color combinations such as blue text on a black background (and I have seen that in magazines), or perhaps in the graphics, could be critical, aiding or obscuring reading. And speaking of graphics, a review of financial graphs indicated that they have got away with being inaccurate, and thus misleading, partly because they are beyond routine auditing (Penrose, 2008). This is more than an issue of aesthetics but also about truth telling. If a graph is made hard to read, could it be said that the report becomes misleading? Equally, if words chosen to convey a corporation’s past, its present situation, and its outlook are subject to manipulation, one should be careful about its interpretation.

The values of the organization can be presented in annual reports’ visual elements, underlining or skewing the financial content (Finley Graves et al., 1996), including their (carefully selected?) cultural ones. A corporation that wants to be thought of as environmentally aware might look to enhance that perception through pictures of healthy landscapes. The inherent artistic choices involved in combining the text and visual components expose the limitations of applying financial analyses, as they open the report to wider interpretation in what Carol David describes as mythmaking. Consequently, she calls for more effective criteria in assessing the ethics of reporting (David, 2001).

Another example of where the nature of the images helps to reinforce a key message could be by showing happy staff or customers. A previous special issue of the AAAJ (Vol. 22 Issue 6) in 2009, Visual perspectives on accounting and accountability, contemplated such things as the presence of faces in annual reports, for example (Campbell et al., 2009) and my own current review of Qantas Airlines’ annual reports notes how this element is emphasized when teamwork within the organization is being promoted to the public, for instance.

While all of this seems mere common sense, reflecting part of the set of considerations that we normally bring to reading the reports, there are subtleties at work that do not always register so distinctly. A 2002 literature review found that few studies existed focusing on the way that different parts of an annual report are integrated, concluding that there was “diversity in the ways of seeing the annual report and tension in understanding its overall purpose and role” (Stanton and Stanton, 2002). More than this, I would suggest that a corporation’s consecutive annual reports could be seen as chapters in an ongoing narrative that has many key similarities to traditional storytelling. A major goal in conventional storytelling is to elicit curiosity in the reader, a sense of ownership that might be summarized in the question, “What happens next?” That is all about reader engagement.

Rather than worry about the semiological issues and opportunities available to distort important messages, we could look at the prospects for embracing embellishments to annual reports. In an age of Twitter and animated video, of sound bytes and participatory art making, why not capitalize on reader involvement and introduce some fun to the annual report package? We could have reports with the shareholders able to put their own faces into a given picture (or even on the cover of a personalized version a la Ikea catalogues). What about downloadable games or a video clip with music that can be customized? I like the idea of fan fiction here, which is where readers are invited or simply feel compelled to continue the “story so far” by writing the next chapter, or to invent parallel ones.

Thus, annual reports could have an interactive aspect for readers in which a key figure, maybe the CEO, is the hero of the piece and has to rescue the organization from a looming change legislation, or penetrate a new market, or decimate an army of inefficient workers, or slay the evil overlord in the taxation authority, or more! And why not represent it in comic form? The creative content in this issue is “The story of double entry bookkeeping”, another contribution from Vida Botes, this time with artwork by Hamish Williams. Their piece wryly depicts a meeting between Leonardo da Vinci and his sometime collaborator Luca Paciolo. Maybe this kind of work has a future in both annual reports and the world of education.

Your own creative contributions can be submitted via ScholarOne (see below), and your email correspondence is always welcome, of course, at: steve.evans@flinders.edu.au

Acknowledgements

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights Section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ. Author guidelines for contributions to this section of the journal can be found at: www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=aaaj

Steve EvansLiterary Editor