A critical genre analysis of MD&A discourse in corporate annual reports

Abstract

Based on the texts of ‘Management Discussion and Analysis on Financial Status and Business’ (MD&A) collected from 118 American corporate annual reports, this study investigated how the professional discourse is realized from the dimensions of text, genre, professional practice and professional culture, according to the framework of the Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) theory. It was found that (1) In the text dimension, lexicon features regarding vocabulary volume, vocabulary highlighting, readability and sentiment are unique to MD&As; (2) the genre of MD&As corresponds to a rhetorical structure of 3 moves and 10 steps; (3) the professional practice of MD&As is represented by three types of interdiscursivity, that is, shifting, mixing and embedding; (4) the professional culture of MD&As is embodied through identity enculturation, human-oriented value, cooperation awareness and self-serving manner. The results of this study help to better understand the realization of professional discourse and expand the application of CGA in professional practice. The findings presented herein are expected to enhance interdisciplinary research that relates language with corporate performance.

A Critical Genre Analysis of Negative Parts in CSR Reports

“…By adopting the theory of critical genre analysis, this research has analyzed the bad information in the CSR report, it mainly elaborates the discussion of such discourse from the perspective of genre, professional practice. In terms of the genre level, it had found 3 major moves and 11 steps, among these 11 steps, "presenting the importance of safety", "showing safety commitment/strategies"', "describing the overall safety performance", "promising better future safety endeavour" similar to the finding of [21] negative part discourse also achieves the same goal of promoting a trust-worthy image by adopting these core steps. The major contribution of the current study is that it enhances the understanding of the professional nature of negative part of in the CSR report of corporate communication, the study illustrates how diverse types of discourse on the same genre could facilitate the realization of professional culture.…”

“…Previous studies on the linguistic aspect of negative parts of CSR reports can be divided into two strands. The first is mainly from the "form" of the language [21]. The first is mainly from the "content" of the language, reference [11] examined the negative disclosure released by197 Australian companies from 1980 to 1991 and reveals that not all companies provided the provision of six types of 'negative environmental disclosures [11] Recently, the study by [15] closely analysed the sustainability performances, and their results suggest that the company that has a weak financial performance is likely to a high percentage of negative disclosure.…”

“…In order to tackle such theoretical limitation, Bhatia proposed the CGA theory, which focuses on the demystification of professional practice through the medium of genres and aims to provide and reinforce our understanding of and inclination for the organization of professional genres and actions [4], it states that professional practice, interdiscursivity and multi-perspectives are the essence of CGA. with the popularity of CGA, it has been applied into the analysis of the business discourse the MD&A discourse in the annual report [21]. This study aims to expand the application of CGA research by analysing the interdiscursivity, the professional culture in business communication.…”

A stylometric approach to the interdiscursivity of professional practice

“…Bhatia (2012) explored the interaction of ideology between promotion, image-building, and self-serving manner that brings hybridization to corporate social responsibility reporting. As remarked in similar research, those linguistic resources unpack a discourse integrated by professional practices from the perspective of discursive features, in turn laying the basis for a probe into interdiscursivity which accounts for that discourse integration (Liu et al, 2021;Qian, 2020;Zappettini & Unerman, 2016).…”

Responsible communication

“…Den prototypiska genren i årsredovisningarnas genresystem utgörs av företagens årsredovisningar, där det ingår flera olika subgenrer (se t.ex. Bondi & Yu 2018;Qian 2020).…”