A Review of the Studies of Narrative Information in Corporate Annual Reports

The narrative information is an integral part of corporate annual reports (CAR) and offers complementary insights into the operations of the reporting company. In recent years, investors have come to realize that the narrative information in corporate annual reports should be worthy of special attention with the frequent occurrences of financial fraud cases. Researchers of accounting, finance, management and linguistics have increasingly focused their efforts on investigating the narrative information and it is now recognized that there is an urgent need to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the study of narratives in corporate annual reports. This paper responds to this call and conducts a review of the studies on the narrative information in the CAR, and we find that (a) most previous research are one-dimensional, (b) systematic comparative and empirical studies are far from enough. Our findings contribute to a systematic understanding of the literature of narratives in the CAR and have useful implications for the relevant research and Business English (BE) pedagogy in the context of China