Carillion’s strategic choices and boardroom’s strategies of persuasive appeals: ethos, logos, pathos

Companies documents such as annual reports incorporate narratives of repetitive rhetorical strategiesas effective mechanisms adopted by companies’ boardrooms to promote strategic change and strategicchoices. These mechanisms can be viewed as persuasive appeals to facilitate boardroom discourses.Yet, such persuasive appeals are instrumental in releasing significant signs regarding the outcomes ofunsuccessful strategic choices that led companies to collapse such as Enron (USA) and Carillion (UK).Despite the contribution of previous research through narrative analysis domains, conceptualizationof narrative practices remains a relatively a neglected area in the extant accounting literature. Thisstudy attempts to offer insights to boardrooms discourses through critical discourse analysis ofpersuasive strategies embedded in company’s annual reports. Findings of this study show howpersuasive strategies and repetitive slogans trigger the discourses of Carillion’s annual reports bydrawing on perspectives from upper echelon theory, impression management and communicationpatterns. Our analytical framework is rooted in Aristotle’s three pillars of rhetorical proofs; ethos(credibility/trustworthiness), pathos (emotion/identification through cultural domains) and logos(reason/rationale) in investigating narrative extracts regarding persuasive appeals strategies adoptedby Carillion’s board through annual reports that facilitate discourse regarding Carillion strategicchoices. Further, we emphasis on repetitive rhetorical slogans strategies embedded in the annualreports regarding Carillion’s acquisitions strategy. We viewed acquisitions narratives as rhetoricalcommunication artefacts and analyze the repetitive rhetoric slogans in these corporate documents.Findings reveal that Carillion’ board strategically use repetitive rhetoric slogans to shape optimisticcorporate future performance which might be different from the feasible reality. Finally, we argue thatcorporate executives are striving to construct an alternative reality stem from their initial unrealisticaspiration to lead their sector of less controlled market share. Findings of this study have theoreticaland managerial implications