The Diversity of the Annual Report in an International Context

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the diversity of the annual report in an international context from a genre perspective. In order to do so, a corpus-based small-scale study of
German, Danish, and English annual reports is presented. The research question to be answered is: to what extent are macro-structural genre conventions of annual reports, written in English and published by non-English companies, identical with the genre conventions of annual reports, written in English and published by English companies? On the basis of the genre approach by Engberg (2001), the annual report is presented as a complex genre which serves two subordinate communicative purposes that are potentially in conflict. A catalogue of ten potential categories of texts serves as point of reference for the analysis of the macro-structure as the main category of analysis. It is argued that not all texts serve both of the two subordinate communicative purposes equally and that they thus may contribute differently to the fulfilment of the overall communicative purpose of the annual report. The analysis documents that the genre conventions of German, Danish and English annual reports feature both similarities and differences and the results serve as an impetus for further research into the field.