Rationality and rhetoric in the corporate world: The corporate annual report as an Aristotelian Genre

Abstract

This paper is part of a research programme into corporate annual reports. Reports do provide the information on the past performance, present state and future prospects which investors in listed companies require for the rational choices attributed to them. They also reveal the companies' responsiveness to the publics comprising the civil societies in which they are embedded. This effect requires more than strict rationality. To use Simon's distinction, the reports then entail both substantive and procedural rationalities. We argue that classical rhetoric and its recovery in the 'new rhetoric' yield useful approaches to the latter, and that annual reports comprise a genre in the rhetorical sense. We illustrate our case through generic features in the reports of the Australian-based multinational, Amcor. We suggest for future research that accounts of corporate functioning are incomplete unless they include the pre-structured interaction between companies and their publics which we have shown here through rhetoric.