Exploring the nature of risk disclosure in the annual report narratives of Bangladeshi pharmaceutical companies: an impression management perspective

In today’s corporate domain, the issue of accountability has become one of the most important topics of discussion. Organisations are not only reporting their financial information (in the form of financial statements) to the stakeholders, they are also reporting on many relevant issues in the form of narratives. Risk reporting is a kind of narrative disclosure that is increasingly drawing attention from the accounting researchers. Drawing on the interpretations from an impression management perspective, this study applies discourse analysis on the risk related corporate narratives in the annual reports of the pharmaceutical companies listed in the Dhaka Stock Exchange, Bangladesh. It was found that the risk disclosures of these companies are mainly generic, rhetorical, selective and in many cases, repetitive in nature. Through an impression management theory lens, we argue that such disclosures are mostly serving as the tools of impression management and may not be useful for the readers.