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Annual Reports: They're For Research Now

Gaetan Breton, University du Quebec (Montreal), has published "Semiotic Analysis of Storytelling in the Annual Report." Here is the abstract.

This paper wants to explore the use of semiotics analysis to better understand the annual report. We start with the idea that the annual report is telling stories to the reader. As a form of novel, we can analyse it with the same instrument.

Our purpose here is methodological. We want to propose an organized body of techniques that will allow anybody to conduct analysis from it. Therefore we use uniquely one example, to illustrate the method.

The advantages of semiotics over content analysis are numerous. Content analysis remains quite trivial (counting words) while semiotics analysis take into account the structure of the story at many levels.

Framed by the categories of the Aristotle's rhetoric, we develop a method that is replicable with a limited background in the source disciplines. Our results suggest that the annual report is clearly telling stories and respond quite positively to this kind of approach.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Full post as published by Law & Humanities Blog on March 06, 2009 (boomark / email).