Annual Company Reports’ narratives migrate to the Web: A diachronic perspective
Cinzia Giglioni
Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, ItalyCinzia Giglioni holds a research and teaching position at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome “La Sapienza”. She was a contract professor for several years in different universities in Italy, teaching both BA and first level master degree students. Her research interests span from second language acquisition to discourse analysis, especially in the context of LSP research. Her most recent contributions focus on the linguistic aspects of corporate and political communication. She has presented papers at several
international conferences and symposia, and has published the results of her research in journals and edited volumes. She regularly collaborates with various international research groups, including CLAVIER (The Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Group) and GERAS (Groupe d’ Etude et de Recherche en Anglais de Spécialité).
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7019-3803
Abstract
Despite the dramatic innovation brought about in the field of corporate communication by the advent of the World Wide Web, when it comes to annual company reports (ACRs), companies seem to introduce few innovative digital elements in the drafting and formatting of the narrative sections. The present study, as the last step of a long-term research project, aimed at investigating this genre from a diachronic point of view by concentrating on the transformations that ACRs’ corporate narratives undergo once they migrate to the Web. Two standpoints emerge: the first sees companies that are highly engaged in the digital environment take advantage of several digital tools at once, while the second proposes a slightly less technological approach whereby simple ACRs in pdf format are uploaded on the company website therefore lacking the most interactive functions. While radical changes in the presentation of ACRs’ narratives between 2000 and 2018 cannot be traced, some companies have decided to deal with such narratives by reporting either the complete narrative or its synthesis.Keywords:
annual company report, corporate narrative, digital environment, genre theory, diachronic perspectiveReferences
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Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy
Cinzia Giglioni holds a research and teaching position at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Rome “La Sapienza”. She was a contract professor for several years in different universities in Italy, teaching both BA and first level master degree students. Her research interests span from second language acquisition to discourse analysis, especially in the context of LSP research. Her most recent contributions focus on the linguistic aspects of corporate and political communication. She has presented papers at several
international conferences and symposia, and has published the results of her research in journals and edited volumes. She regularly collaborates with various international research groups, including CLAVIER (The Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Group) and GERAS (Groupe d’ Etude et de Recherche en Anglais de Spécialité).
