The Narrative Strategies of Winners and Losers: Analyzing Annual Reports of Publicly Traded Corporations

Abstract

This study focuses on the narrative strategies corporations utilize to communicate their annual results to investors and the financial community. Specifically, the study looks at the sample of overperforming and underperforming companies and analyzes how management shapes their performance results using a variety of narrative strategies in their annual reports. The study uses DICTION software in order to perform a computerized content analysis of annual reports of a purposive sample of Standard & Poor’s 500 corporations and identify and compare the usage of the 35 narrative strategies.