Corporate narratives and textual analysis : perspectives on top management’s language use in financial and sustainability reporting

We examine the language used by top management in CEO letters incorporated in FR and SR as distinct genres.Differences in regulatory context, projected audience and evaluative legitimacy criteria ground distinct shared conventions and expectations, affecting a CEO's linguistic style in each reporting genre.We expect those shared conventions and expectations to be anchored more in an accountability logic and related formal reasoning in FR CEO letters and more storytelling and affective positioning in SR CEO letters.Moreover, we expect that regional-level institutional setting to affect linguistic style given differences in implicit versus explicit CSR cultures.Focusing on patterns of linguistic indicators, we identify and reveal distinct linguistic styles in FR and SR CEO letters, significantly calibrated by institutional environment.