Annual Company Reports’ narratives migrate to the Web: A diachronic perspective

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.