No abstract

In his comment, Jones discusses prior findings on the relationship between corporate performance and readability of narrative sections of corporate annual reports. More specifically, Jones focuses on our findings (Subramanian, Insley, & Blackwell, 1993) as reported in The Journal of Business Communication. We reported that, based on a style analysis of 60 corporate annual reports, companies that performed well (in terms of absolute net profits) had narrative sections of their annual reports that were easier to read than those of companies that performed poorly. Our findings, thus, appeared to contradict earlier findings by Courtis (1986) and Jones (1988), neither of whom found a positive correlation between readability and performance. We ascribed possible reasons for the contradictory findings that included the use of different measures of performance and the time frame used in the study.Courtis' (1986) study used four measures of performance (current ratio, leverage, earnings variability, and rate of return on total assets) that we argued were derived measures. These derived measures were different from our absolute measure of &dquo;net profits&dquo; which could have resulted in different findings.We also reported that Jones' (1988) study used &dquo;sales turnover&dquo; as the sole measure of corporate performance which, being different from our measure of net income, could have caused the findings to be different. However, as Jones correctly points out in his comment, his 1988 study also used net profit to sales and return on capital employed as measures of performance in addition to sales turnover. We apologize for this oversight in stating that Jones used sales turnover as the sole measure of performance. However, our contention is that Jones' measures-net profit to sales and return on capital employed are derived measures, while sales turnover is a different absolute measure than net profit-were different from those we used and that this difference could have caused the contradictory findings. In addition, as Jones points out in his comment, his was a longitudinal study (covering the period 1952-1985) of a single firm, while our study was cross-sectional, using a sample of 60 corporations.In addition to measures used and time frame, we feel that another factor that may have caused our results to be different from those of

This paper comes from a workshop we ran at the 1980 A.F.T. Annual Conference at Bangor. It looks at the wider context of family therapy and the systemic view and attempts to open up areas for further investigation.