Investigating the influence of cultural factors in the disclosure of corporate strategies in annual reports by 100 European firms: does context matter?

Since Geert Hofstede's path-breaking studies, quantitative methods of intercultural research are very popular. This article presents quantitative intercultural research in this domain that appeared to need badly to call upon the prolific qualitative anthropological studies of American and European cultures by Hall to give conclusive results. As businesses become more international, corporate strategy disclosure must often be done across cultural groups. This has implications for the globalising business rhetoric to be used by technical and business communicators who often help develop a corporate strategy. They do this by effective annual report writing by both text and visuals. We summarise research on the influence of cultural factors in disclosing corporate strategies in annual reports by 100 European firms equally distributed over five countries. Hall's high-low context distinction appears to offer a better perspective for international communicators to help them globalise annual reports for a better corporate strategy to benefit all stakeholders.