Persuasive Text in Company Annual Reports: A case study of UK-Saudi Cultural Differences (Cranswick versus Almarai)

Abstract

Annual reports represent an important interface between businesses and their investors and other stakeholders, not least as a means of persuading readers of the excellence of the company. The persuasive aspect of the text of company annual reports however is relatively little researched in respect of its potential reflection of cultural differences between countries. Indeed, experts differ in whether they see company annual reports as essentially an international invariant genre of business writing or as something inevitably embodying local cultural differences. This study therefore assesses for the first time whether the cultural differences between UK and Saudi Arabia are reflected in the persuasive elements of the text of company annual reports. This is effected by an in depth case study analysis of the persuasive text of the 2023 annual reports of a matched pair of companies (Saudi Almarai and UK Cranswick). In a groundbreaking mixed method analysis, two quantitative analyses (positive-negative lexical analysis and readability analysis) and two qualitative document analyses (rhetorical analysis of attributions of positive points, and of mitigation strategies for negative points) were undertaken. Results showed that all four analyses agreed in consistently showing some differences between the nature of the persuasiveness in the two company report texts and that those differences are eminently explicable as being due to cultural differences between the UK and Saudi Arabia, especially on the individualist-collectivist (UK vs KSA) dimension. Implications and suggestions for further work are discussed.