No Longer Only Numbers: An Exploratory Analysis of the Visual Turn in Reporting of Public Sector Organisations

Abstract

Organisations, especially in the public sector, are developing reporting tools able to communicate different dimensions of performance to meet an increasing demand for accountability. Scholars and practitioners have focused mainly on the financial figures and narratives contained in these reports; there has been much less interest in their visual dimension. This chapter focuses on the visual dimension of reports, specifically the use of images in the reports of public sector organisations (PSOs) for evaluating their potential contribution to accountability processes by conveying information difficult to translate in numbers. To this end, adopting a Barthesian perspective, a case study has been developed by using the images contained in the sustainability reports published between 2003 and 2017 by a PSO operating in the multi-utility sector.