Cultural styles in corporate communication

Despite the wide degree of variation in the representation of information in corporate reporting, there remains a clear distinction between the way non-obligatory company information is displayed in German and U. S. American annual reports. Due to the considerable consolidation that has occurred recently in the banking industry, the four largest German and U. S. American banks' annual reports can be considered good examples for this study of culturally-dependent corporate communication styles. The differences in cultural communication styles are investigated in this book through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the interplay between communicative elements on the printed page. How and to what extent are people displayed in the voluntary section of the annual reports, for example? How do these findings relate to the text, and what are the implicit assumptions present in the construction of the document? In the light of results from this study, as well as from previous studies of cultural style, the book describes some of the crucial principles that lie behind the German and U. S. style of print communication, and gives some historical explanations regarding their cultural origin. Finally, the possible shifting of the German cultural style towards a more Anglo-Saxon way of representing information during the period 1997-2007 is discussed, while taking into account mechanisms of social, cultural and communicative systems.