We create value...A corpus assisted analysis of persuasive discourse in Annual Report Business Models

In recent years, the business model (BM) has been the focus of substantial attention from both academics and practitioners as well as a growing number of practitioner-oriented studies. Despite the overall surge in the literature on BMs, extant research is fragmented and mainly developed according to three main interest areas identified as (1) e-business and the use of information technology in organizations; (2) strategic issues, such as value creation, competitive advantage, and firm performance; (3) and innovation and technology management (Zott et al. 2011). Researchers (and practitioners) have yet to develop a common and widely accepted language that would allow them to examine the business model construct through different lenses by drawing effectively on the work of others (Zott et al. 2011). Much research acknowledges that the BM is a new unit of analysis which is distinct from the strategic review, as the BM boundaries are wider than those of the firm and they emphasize a holistic approach to explaining how companies create value by means of their activities and relationships with internal and external partners. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of studies focusing in depth on BM narratives, that is a text that re-describes and re-constructs reality – whether actual or imagined - in a way that is always partial, interested and intent on persuading (De Cock 2000). When a company embraces its BM as a narrative, it decides to construct a representation of how it might succeed in a particular environment by identifying itself with similar companies while disassociating itself from others (Perkmann and Spicer 2010). Thus, a business model is an external identity a firm can adopt to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of potential investors, suppliers and clients. In turn, this legitimacy may result in real resource flows. Such considerations are particularly relevant for companies in new technology contexts which are characterized by high uncertainty over future performance (Zott and Huy 2007). Against this background, the purpose of this research is to extend extant studies by investigating how persuasive discourse is built and used in BMs within annual reports (ARs). Prior studies have prevalently investigated annual reports from a socio-psychological perspective by applying content analysis to systematically identify specific characteristics within discourse (Ober et al. 1999) to build a classification scheme (Brennan et al., 2010). Also the readability level approach, that is, the number of syllables and mean sentence length which are perceived to be good indicators of the syntactic difficulty of a passage read by a target audience (Li 2010) have frequently been applied to ARs. Within these, the CEO’s letter to shareholders has mainly been explored by analyzing the rhetorical importance in building credibility and imparting confidence in share/stakeholders (Hyland 1998) or by adopting a critical discourse analysis of impression management and obfuscation (Merkl-Davies and Koller 2012). By contrast, there is limited research of the persuasive features used in the BM (Koller 2011) to create corporate value. Persuasive discourse is defined as the non-reciprocal attempt or intention of one party to change the behaviour, feelings, intentions, or viewpoint of another by communicative means (Lakoff 1982). To be persuasive management has to achieve several concurrent purposes, appealing to share/stakeholders on both affective and logical levels simultaneously, given the multidimensional aspect of language. The methodology adopted is mixed. The study starts with a qualitative selection of the BM narratives to be included in a small specialised corpus. This is analysed by a corpus assisted discourse study (CADS). The principal endeavor of CADS is the investigation and comparison of features of particular discourse types, which integrates into the analysis the techniques and tools developed within corpus linguistics (Stubbs 1996). By the application of a computer software suite, lexical and metadiscursive devices are analysed within word lists, word-cluster frequency lists and concordances (Partington et al. 2004), in order to explore how the use of discursive interrelations among the factors that affect a company’s ability to create value can offer a holistic view of the BM (Beattie and Smith 2013) as well as persuade by inducing expectations about a company’s future (Magretta 2002).