Kommunikation via årsredovisningar omkring finansiella kriser : Longitudinell studie av de fyra svenska storbankerna

The survival of firms depends mainly on how their actions incorporate with the expectations and values of the general public. However, the public do not have full access to the organization and its behavior. One response to this gap of information is the annual report. In recent years firms’ annual report has had a tremendous development and is considered one of the most important means of communicating with the public. The content of the reports has undergone a radical change in which they evolved from purely financial statements to being widely used as a marketing channel. Annual reports intend to inform the public about the organizations behavior in order to legitimize the business. Communicating with the public is a difficult task but becomes even harder when the legitimacy is questioned.The purpose of this paper has been to achieve a greater understanding of how business information is communicated and reflected in firms’ annual reports around financial crises. The financial crises that occurred in 2008 affected many companies, particularly banks around the world. A case study of the four major banks in Sweden has been conducted in which an actor’s approach has been adopted during the study. The annual reports of each bank between the year 2006 and 2011 has been the subject of a discourse and content analysis in which signals has been identified and sorted into categories(product, market, organizational and risk) in order to present how the communication evolved. An analysis of the signals revealed a consensus in which all banks show tendencies to emphasize one's own organization to a greater extent before and after the crisis, the banks tend instead to focus their communication on highlighting risk factors and more substantially actions taken as identified in the risk category. The study has shown those uncertain times when legitimacy is questioned have an effect on banks way of orienting their communications. The change in orienting communication is indicatedby the weighting of the signals has changed during the crisis, and will strive to return to a state more likely before crisis for the most categories. The study also shows that the signal theory is strongly linked to the legitimacy theory, in order to gain legitimacy banks must send signals that convince the public that their organization acts in accordance with what is expected of them.Validerat; 20120906 (anonymous