PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE THE TELEVISION EPISTEMOLOGY OF U S ANNUAL REPORTS

Description
In this analysis, we argue that the &king visual design that has characterized U.S. annual reports since
the 1960s lncludii brilliant color pictures, gloss, and novelty formats, is a manifestation of tbe television
epistemology that informs wide ranges of contemporary public discoursc in America. Correspondingly,
we contend that visual design ln US. annual reports constitutes a form of rhetoric asserting the “truth
claims” of the reports. Such truth clahns relate not only to the values expounded in the text or projected
in the pictures, but to those residing in the accounts themselves.

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PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE: THE TELEVISION EPISTEMOLOGY
OF U.S. ANNUAL REPORTS*
0. FINLEY GRAVES
University of Mississippi
DALE L. FLESHER
University of Mississippi
and
ROBERT E. JORDAN
University of Wisconsin - Superior
Abstract
In this analysis, we argue that the &king visual design that has characterized U.S. annual reports since
the 1960s lncludii brilliant color pictures, gloss, and novelty formats, is a manifestation of tbe television
epistemology that informs wide ranges of contemporary public discoursc in America. Correspondingly,
we contend that visual design ln US. annual reports constitutes a form of rhetoric asserting the “truth
claims” of the reports. Such truth clahns relate not only to the values expounded in the text or projected
in the pictures, but to those residing in the accounts themselves.
Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must
appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged.
Nell Postman
In a cartoon distributed in 1991 by North Amer-
ica Syndicate, a table of corpulent, cigar-puffing
board members (all male) sit in overstuffed
conference chairs beneath a logo proclaiming
the “Yummy” Cereal Company. Copies of a
bound but unopened report lie in front of
each board member while a speaker at the
head of the table, apparently quite pleased,
announces: “There’s a prize in each annual
report.”
For Americans in general, the most common
understanding of the cartoon will be that of a
satire on the widespread practice among U.S.
cereal companies of including “prizes” in cereal
boxes. In this regard, the cartoon is only mildly
humorous, its effect lying primarily in its exag-
geration of the prevalence of the custom: so
pervasive is the practice, the cartoon implies,
that finding a prize in a cereal company’s
annual report would scarcely seem out of the
l An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Critical Perspectives on Accounting Symposium, New York, April 1993,
and the Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association, Turku, Finland, also April 1993. Tbe paper has benefited
in particular from the comments of David Cooper and Tom Lee, the ideas and suggestions of Anthony Hopwood, and the
useful advice of an anonymous reviewer.
57
0. F. GRAVES et al
“There’s a prize in each annual report!”
Fig. 1. “There’s a prize in each annual report.” 1991 GRIN & BEAR IT cartoon distributed by North America Syndicate.
(Reprinted with special permission of North America Syndicate 0 1991.)
ordinary. Also contributing to the effect of the
cartoon, however, is the contrast between the
tritlingness of cereal-box prizes - most are trin-
kets intended to amuse children - and the ser-
iousness one usually associates with company
annual reports, such reports belonging as they
do to the competitive, “man’s world” of finan-
cial decision-making.
For those familiar with recent trends in the
formats of U.S. annual reports, this latter aspect
of the satire in the cartoon cuts deeper than the
cartoonist him- or herself may have intended.
One need only call to mind the glossy, full-page
photographs, colorful pie graphs, and even
occasional lagniappes that have come to char-
acterize U.S. annual reports in recent years to
construe the cartoon as as much a caricature of
contemporary annual reports themselves as of
the marketing practices of cereal companies.
The satire in the cartoon, whether aimed at
the excesses of commercialization or the appar-
ent trivialization of annual reports, is not with-
out considerable social significance. Indeed,
the social significance of cartoon satire is well
documented (Becker, 1959; Hess & Kaplan,
1975; Marshall, 1980; Harrison, 1981). Marshall
(p. 784), for example, in an essay on the history
of cartooning in the United States, explains that
cartoons that consciously satirize “provide
more valuable insights into the events of the
time than charts, statistical graphs or treatises
ever could” and that ordinary, “humorous”
cartoons allow the tracing of a “respectable
social history of America”.
The purpose of the present analysis is to
expand on the satire in the above cartoon relat-
ing to the visually striking formats of contem-
porary U.S. annual reports and to shed light on
the social function those formats serve. In par-
ticular, we argue that the visual imagery and
aesthetically pleasing design in U.S. annual
reports are, paradoxically, not at all trivial,
that their purpose is not merely aesthetic grat-
ification. gather, drawing on Postman’s (1985)
critique of the epistemology of television (the
definition and regulation of truth by means of
the televisual media-metaphors of image, enter-
tainment, and immediacy) as the supra-ideology
of public discourse in America, we contend that
visual design represents an essential aspect of
the rhetoric of U.S. annual reports and, as such,
constitutes an important component of the
truth claims of those reports. According to Post-
man, the all-pervasiveness of television and its
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 59
mode of knowing the world have so restruc-
tured the American mind that for any discourse
to be perceived as valid, it must be presented in
a television format, that is, one that is at once
kaleidoscopic, glamorous, and entertaining. To
persuade the public of the authenticity of their
reports, accordingly, preparers of U.S. annual
reports have more and more found it useful to
cast them in terms of television and thus to
emphasize visual design, gloss, and novelty.
In elaborating on the rhetorical nature of
visual design in annual reports, we first con-
tend, in contrast to Cooper et al. (1992) that
the aesthetic moment that inheres in the idea of
balanced accounts does not constitute the only,
remnant meaning in accounts for contemporary
(postmodern) report readers and, conse-
quently, that the “complementary” aestheti-
cism that inheres in visual design does not, in
itself, fully explain its inclusion in those reports.
Indeed, we argue that accounts have not lost
their claim to truth among the American pub-
lic, but constitute, for Americans in general, a
meaningful - and thus authentic - social con-
struct. In this connection, we contend that the
pictures and gloss in U.S. annual reports func-
tion rhetorically to assert not only the specific
values and public relations agendas of individual
companies, but the truth claims of the accounts
themselves, including their political economy.
If visual design functions rhetorically to
assert the truth claims of annual reports, how-
ever, the question arises as to how visual design
has come to constitute a form of rhetoric. In
addressing this question, we look to the extra-
discursive, historically specific institutional set-
ting (Thompson, 1991) implicated in the con-
struction of those reports. It is in this regard in
particular - to shed light on the institutional
setting in question - that we invoke Postman’s
characterization of “valid” contemporary pub
lit discourse as television-based and argue that
the visually stimulating formats of U.S. annual
reports reflect the widespread adaptation of
U.S. public discourse to the modality of televi-
sion. Correspondingly, we identify television
(and its characteristic epistemology) as the pri-
mary institutional moment giving shape to the
colorful, entertaining formats of contemporary
U.S. annual reports.
As empirical evidence of the infusion of U.S.
annual reports with the epistemology of televi-
sion, we provide examples of visually engag-
ing, entertaining annual report layouts from
the 1960s to the present. In addition, we
describe the particular roles the philosophies
of the television commercial and the television
newscast have played in shaping the form and
content of contemporary annual reports and,
again, offer concrete illustrations. Finally, as
historical evidence of the association between
the epistomology of television and visually
attractive layouts in U.S. annual reports, we
locate both the advent of television broadcast-
ing and the initial widespread use of photo
graphs in annual reports (the latter on the
basis of an empirical investigation) in the mid-
1940s; describe the thoroughgoing success of
television in the United States in the 1950s;
and relate the transformation that occurred in
the design of U.S. annual reports c. 1960 (the
transformation from a relatively straightfor-
ward, financial-report format to one emphasiz-
ing striking visual
American triumph.
ACCOUNTING,
imagery) to television’s
TRUTH, AND SHOW
BUSINESS
Accounts and “truth”
The function of visual design in annual
reports was recently critiqued by Cooper et
al. (1992),’ who interpret annual accounts as
’ Presented at the 15th Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association, Madrid, Spain, April 1992. The following
allusions to the contents of the Cooper et al. paper are made for purposes of siting our analysis in relation to theirs only.
Cooper et al. is a rich, intertextual paper that defies brief description. Another recent analysis of visual imagery in a~ual
reports is by Preston et al. (1994), who address the representational, ideological, and constitutive role of such imagery.
60 0. F. GRAVES et al.
simulacra - constructs, which, in the postmo-
dern world, have lost all relationship to the
economic reality they purport to represent.
For these writers, financial statements’ appeal
to authenticity no longer rests on rationality,
but on the aestheticism that inheres in the
roots and workings of accounting itself - in
the ideas of balanced accounts and statements
that articulate. The inclusion of color pictures
and pleasing formats in the construction of
contemporary annual reports, in turn, is in
their view intended to complement the aesthe-
ticism of the accounts. Indeed, for them the
pictures are more real than the accounts:
academics from the past thirty years have
attempted to lay the scientistic grid on accounting,
bend and shape it into predictive functions, lay down
uniformity of either substance or form, bolster it in its
failure in face of a world of semi-strong market effi-
ciency. The truth Lies [instead] in the colour pictures
that now form an integral part of the financial state-
ments. They encapsulate the intrinsic nature of
the real accounts. They arc more real than the num-
bers. Accounting numbers merely add to the gloss;
this time, the aesthetic gloss of precision (Cooper el
al., 1992, p. 25).
Cooper et al . explain the function of the
“double aesthetic” they ascribe to contempor-
ary annual reports as a mode d’ussuj ettfsse-
ment (Foucault, 1985). In the context of
modernism, they contend, accounts, under-
stood as a rational and valid pictorialization
of the “real”, had constituted a process
through which discipline - and thus social
control - was exercised:
The operati ons of accountancy [as a modernist project]
enact upon the social body the Imposition of a code.
This operation is inherently one of striation; economic
man has been gridded, subject to the control of a
discipline which privileges the use of number in the
construction of social reality @. 12).
In the postmodem context (in which accounts
have lost their claim to authenticity), on the
other hand, aestheticism remains the only
“meaningful channel” between user and pro.
ducer of annual reports. In this regard, aesthe-
ticism has superseded the modernist use of
numbers as a means of social control, although
in dispersed and microstructural form (cf. Fou-
cault, 1985).
We take issue with Cooper et al . i n several
respects.* Above all, we question a postmodem
consciousness on the part of U.S. readers of
annual reports. More specifically, we question
whether accounting’s claim to economic rea-
lity has lost its authority among the general
public. Rather, we would suggest that for U.S.
annual report readers3 annual accounts have
retained their authenticity, that their meaning
among the public is not merely aesthetic. In
this regard, we would cite Gallhofer & Haslam
(1991) who, like Cooper et al ., draw on Benja-
min (1969) and other members of the Frankfurt
School to relate the Critical Theory concept of
“aut..$,4
to accounting, but who, unlike Cooper
et al ., emphasize accounting’s continuing
’ Our “taking issue” with Cooper el al. should not be understood as an attempt to refute. gather, we would point to the
legitimacy of multiple readings of a “text” (Barthes, 1970, 1979; Derrida, 1976; Bauman, 1987). Indeed, we believe that
multiple readings of a text enrich our understanding.
3 Cooper et al. do not de!ine clearly whom they envision as the postmodem reader of annual reports, i.e. whether they
identi@the postmodem reader with preparers, the general public, or with a narrower subset of users. As to the legitimacy
of assuming a generaI, public readership of annual reports, see parker (1982) who relates corporate annual reports to mass
communication theory:
They [corporate annual reports] involve public documents produced by sizeable organisations, distributed simuka-
neously to large numbers of readers engaged in a wide range of spheres of activity, as an impersonal form of commu-
nication. The audience is usually large, heterogeneous , often unknown to one another and yet united in their
interest in a company’s affairs. The view of corporate annual reporting as an exercise in mass communication is
therefore a viable one @. 280).
* According to Benjamin (1%9), the age of mechanical reproduction has shattered the “aura” of art among the masses;
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 61
distance” from the public: as a product of
“experts”, accounting, like “authentic” art, is
not only distant from but mystifying to the
public. Gallhofer & Haslam delineate the atten-
dant auratic properties of accounting as fol-
lows:
Arguably, the accounting representation is perceived in
the public realm of capitalism to be neutral, objective
(“hue”) and independent @. 491, emphasis added).
Accounting’s aura, they argue further, “engen-
ders an unquestioning acceptance of prevalent
accounting numbers as conveyors of an unpro-
blematic, concrete and ‘valid’ message” (p.
492). The universality of such an unproble-
matic acceptance of accounting’s claim to
truth among the U.S. public5 is borne out lin-
guistically by the fact that the phrase “the bot-
tom line” has assumed a life of its own in
American speech (Russell & Porter, 1973) and
resonates (Frye, 1981) across every category of
U.S. public discourse as a metaphor for ultimate
or definitive truth.
We also question whether the American pub
lit, most of whom are not trained in account-
ing,6 experience the aesthetic roots and work-
ings of accounts when they examine annual
reports. We suggest instead that American
readers look primarily to net income or earn-
ings per share (both variously referred to as
“the bottom line” (Russell & Porter, 1973))
for their appraisal of the potentialities of a
company. Both of these figures, however,
are monolithic; that is, they do not, in and
of themselves, balance with anything else.
To be sure, like Cooper et al ., we recognize
a powerful aesthetic moment in the design of
contemporary annual reports. We associate
that moment, however, with the pictures
and artwork in the reports rather than with
the accounts themselves. Further, we inter-
pret the motivation to provide the aesthetic
moment in annual reports as a response to
the American public’s widespread expecta-
tion that all modes of public discourse -
whether politics, education, business, or
even religion - be presented in an entertain-
ing format (Postman, 1985). More in harmony
with the satire in the above cartoon, then, we
subsume the aestheticism evoked by the for-
mats of annual reports under the more encom-
passing category of entertainment.
We also agree with Cooper et al . that
annual accounts represent a social construct.
Indeed, the literature is replete with studies
on the socially constitutive nature of account-
ing.’ These studies emphasize accounting as an
that is, the ready accessibility of art through mechanical reproduction has undermined art’s ritualistic function (which was
based on the idea of authenticity) and replaced it with a political one. Siily, for Cooper e# al., the “real” organization
annual accounts are meant to depict has vanished under the weight of iniinitely reproducible annual reports, the result
being a fascist aestheticixation of the political.
5 Although GaBhofer & HasIam’s (1991) expkutation of accounting’s aura applies to perceptions of accounting throughout
capitalism, we limit our study to U.S. annual reports and report readers. For while the inclusion of pictures in annual
reports is a worldwide phenomenon and examples of non-U.S. companies that have prepared visually striking annual
reports can be cited (Bcnetton (Italy), 1990; Groupc Andre (France), 1992; Hugo Boss (Germany), 1992; Grand Metropo-
litan (U.K.), 1992), the fact that most countries appear less thoroughIy commercialized and television-based than the
United States precludes broader generaIixation pending a systematic study of ammal report formats across cultures.
6 The Financial Accounting Standards Board, in Statement ofFInan&zl Accounti ng Concepts No. I , pat-a. 34, states its
expectation of a more complex reading on the part of 6nancial statement users: ‘The information should be comprehen-
sible to those willing to study the Information with reasonable diligence.” But as Squiers (1989) notes, “For the average
shareholder, the picture section of the book is much more visible and understandable than the detailed financial section at
the back’ (p. 209).
’ Hines (1991) p. 314n. cites a large number (28) of these studies, noting that the list “is by no means comprehensive”.
62 0. F. GRAVES et al .
“ideographic objectification of the human
mind”,’ constructed to help organize collec-
tive life in a meaningful manner. They also
note how the behaviors of those who prac-
tice, study, or research accounting make
accounting seem given and factual, a part of
the natural world uncovered by science rather
than invented by man. Such reification, in turn,
makes accounting seem neutral and value-free
when, in fact, as a human product, it is neces
sarily subjective and value-laden. In contrast to
Cooper et al., however, we do not view the
accounting construct as a non-denotative resi-
duum of modernism, that is, as a no longer
meaningful social artifact. Rather, we contend
that annual accounts continue to be implicated
in the construction and reproduction of lived
social reality (Chua, 1986; Morgan, 1988;
Hines, 1988, 1991), especially in regard to the
political economy of capitalism (Cooper &
Sherer, 1984). As a form of social reproduc-
tion, moreover, annual accounts - asserting
as they do a particular set of values - serve
to reinforce and sustain the sociopolitical
status quo the accounts helped to con-
struct. In this connection, we suggest that
the function of pictures, gloss, and lag-
niappes in contemporary annual reports is
rhetorical; that is, that their function is to
persuade the report reader of the truth
claims of the accounts and thus to perpetu-
ate the values that reside in them. Also, in
this connection, we would note that the
values that reside in the various televisual
design elements of contemporary annual
reports - the values of entertainment -
are entirely consistent with (and reciprocally
implicated in) those of the accounts they
argue, that is, the political economy of late
capitalism (consumerism).’
Visual design as a form of rhetoric
Recently, a number of writers have called on
accounting researchers to focus on the role of
rhetoric in accounting (Lavoie, 1987; Arrington
& Francis, 1989; Arrington, 1990; Arrington &
Putty, 1991; Arrington & Schwelker, 1992; Kla-
mer & McCloskey, 1992). These authors have,
in particular, emphasized the role of rhetoric in
accounting research, their purpose being to
expose the normative underpinnings of maln-
stream (and hegemonic) positivist theory and,
once the grounds of argument have been made
explicit, to enable response to and conversation
with mainstream positivist researchers. Our ana-
lysis, too, concerns the rhetoric of an accounting
discourse. The object of our investigation, how-
ever, is the discourse of accountingpractice; for
in addressing the function of visual design in U.S.
annual reports, we seek to make explicit the
rhetorical nature of such design and thus to
invite conversation about the underlying values
and truth claims of the reports themselves.
Since the present analysis accommodates
visual design under the rubric of rhetoric, the
understanding of rhetoric it espouses is neces-
sarily a broad one, one not limited to the tradi-
tional understanding that would confine
rhetoric to the protocols of language. Rather,
it relates more to the way in which arguments
* The phraseology is Keman’s (1990, p. 193), who applies it to social constructs as widely varied as, inter alla, literature,
architecture, and economics.
9 Concerning consumerism as the commodification of image, pleasure, and leisure, see BaudriUard (1970), Benjamin
(1982), Ewen & Ewen (1982), Jameson (1983), and Featherstone (1991). We do not pursue the political economy of
the accounts per se in this analysis, nor the company-specific values evident in any particular company’s choice of
photographic subject matter. gather, while keeping in mind that the show business values of television are implicated
in the values of the political economy of consumerism, we concern ourselves with the pictures and novelty design in
annual reports as a form of r&to& (Thompson, 1991). For examples of St udi es that spe&icaUy address sociopolitical
values in annual accounts and reports see Cooper & Sherer (1984), Tinker & Neimark (1987), Lehman &Tinker (1987), and
Neimark (1983, 1992). Concerning the use of pictures and visually appealing design to project positively or to manipulate
the images of companies (i.e. as public relations tools), see Squiers (1989), Rothman & Fins (1990), and Preston et al.
(1994).
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 63
are presented in order to persuade, whether
such discourse is cast in terms of language
(spoken or written) or otherwise.” This
broader understanding of rhetoric allows the
question to be raised as to why one particular
form of rhetoric appears in a “text” and not
another. In this regard, the method of investi-
gation adopted here is analogous to that of
Thompson (1991), who has questioned the
model of language as the most appropriate
framework for rhetorical investigations.
For Thompson, who appeals to Foucault’s
(1972) insistence on recognizing the “institu-
tional moment” in the constitution of dis-
course, it is not the abstract formalities of
rhetoric that are of analytical interest, but the
extradiscursive configurations that give rise to
a particular form of rhetoric. Thus, in answer to
the question “Is accounting rhetorical? “,
Thompson offers a qualified “Yes”:
It is yes in as much that acccounting is arguing and
persuadhtg Iike any other discourse. The quaIification
is raised because, of itself, this answer is not terribly
useful. It has been suggested tbar the terms of a rbeto-
ri c are extra-di scursfue . . l ky are hsMuti onaUy
set and fbe spedj ’kati on of that i nsti tuti onal matri x,
I ts form and consequences, remafns the cri kal anal y-
tkal probl em @. 598, emphasis added).
The specification of the institutional matrix of a
particular rhetoric is of help (where the linguis
tic model is not), he explains, in that it affords
appreciation for the reasons for what is said as
well as how and why it is said. * 1 The remainder
of this study deals with what we perceive as
the primary “institutional moment” - the con-
tingent and historically specific motivation -
for the inclusion of pictures and gloss in con-
temporary U.S. annual reports.12 In particular,
we seek to explain how pictures and other
non-verbal aspects of the layouts of U.S. annual
reports have come to constitute a form of
rhetoric and how that particular form of rhe-
toric serves epistemologically to assert the
values and truth claims residing in those
reports.
U.S. public discourse and the
epistemology of television
The media available to a culture, as Postman
(1985) argues, are a dominant influence on the
formation of its intellectual and social preoccu-
pations. Indeed, the media available to a cul-
ture shape the very way it structures thought
and apprehends reality. They do so in that they
function much like metaphors, unobtrusively
lo Examples of recent studies that explore various non-verbal forms of rhetoric Include Goffman (1976), who considers the
rhetoric of gender con6gurations in commercial photographs; KInross (1989), who considers the rhetorical power of
seemingIy neutral tmin timetables; Buchanan (1989), who considers the persuasiveness of contemporary design, including
that of flatware, furniture, and tools; and Ehses (1989), who considers Invention In graphic communication. Ehses (pp.
188-189) also cites severrl other authors who earlier had addressed the matter of non-verbal forms of rhetoric, including
Curtius and his consideration (1953) of the relationship of rhetoric to painting, architecture, and music.
I1 Thompson (1991) analyzes the institutionaI matrix giving rise to the acceptance and spread of the idea of balanced
accounts in the late 1400s. One of the InstitutionaI moments he identifies is the media-metaphor of print (cf. Postman,
1985), the invention of typography having facilitated the spatial arrangements required by double-entry bookkeeping.
I2 The specific context for any historical phenomenon, of course, involves a matrix of institutional moments. Regarding
the development of vIsuaI design in U.S. annull reports, influences in addition to (and preceding) the epistemology of
television include the Bauhaus movement, many of whose leadI practitioners immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in
the 1930s to escape Nazi repression and who brought with them a new philosophy of graphic design; technological
advances such as photo-offset Lithography, phototypography, faster fdms, and, not least, refined glossy papers that
provided improved print quaI@ the poptdatization of photojournalistic magazines such as Ltfe and Look; the Investment
magaaine Ffnuncfuf Worl d, which since 1942 has rated U.S. annual reports on their quality (defined to include layout); and
the commercialization of American culture. Since the influences of Bauhaus philosophy, technological advances, photo
magazines, and Ffnanci al WorZd have been described elsewhere (CIagett & HIuna, 1988), we do not pursue them here.
We touch on the infIuence of commerciaIization below, in particular with regard to the television commercial.
64 0. F. GRAVES
shaping the content of a culture and thus
implying their special definitions of reality:
Whether we are experiencing the world through the
lens of speech or the printed word or the television
camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for
us, sequence it, frame it, reduce it, color it, argue a
case for what the world is like (p. 10).
Because of the way a particular medium orga-
nizes and Integrates a culture’s thought pro-
cesses, it becomes Implicated ln the culture’s
epistemologies; that is, in how the culture
defines and regulates its definitions of truth.
In oral societies, for example, proverbs are car-
riers of truth, and the ability to memorize, the
mark of intelligence. In print-based societies,
on the other hand, print-referenced citations
are far more important carriers of truth than
proverbs or oral eloquence, and the ability to
read and conceptualize the mark of intelli-
gence. Thus, the ways in which cultures argue
truth (rhetoric in the broadest sense of the
word) as well as their definitions of truth
(their epistemologies) evolve as media evolve.
Postman considers just such a cultural shift,
the shift from a primarily print-based culture to
a primarily image-based one (from the Age of
Typography to the Age of Television, as he
terms it), the most sign&ant American cul-
tural fact of the second half of the twentieth
century:
This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly
shined the content and meaning of public discourse,
since two media so vastly different cannot accommo
date the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes,
the content of politics, religion, education, and anything
In
et al.
else that comprises public business must change and be
recast in terms that are most suitable to television
(p. 8).13
typographic America (colonial America
through the nineteenth century), culture’s con-
versations were conducted in print, and read-
ing was how one participated. And since
reading is expository and lineal, public dis-
course was lineal and analytical. There were
proposition, sequence, coherence, and orderly
arrangement. The printed word was the episte-
mological metaphor for comprehending the
world, and the world was known as a coherent
(if local) place.
The epistemology of the printed word and
the sense of coherence it engendered began
to be undermined with the introduction of tel-
egraphy and the Invention of the photograph.
Characterized by the flashing of messages from
a distance, telegraphy began to fragment the
world into disconnected, impersonal facts.
One could know information about the larger
world instantaneously, but the information was
without context or local implication. Photogra-
phy, in turn,
with its decontextualized
images, l4 only confirmed the world as an asyn-
tactical place. Together, the two media created
a public discourse of selfcontained image and
instancy that explained nothing and asked
nothing. Rather, it was a discourse of sensation-
alism and fascination, offering a “peek-a-boo
world” (Postman, 1985, p. 77) of irrelevance
and entertainment.
The advent of television, Postman argues
further, has raised the interplay of image and
I3 Keman (1990) recognizes a similar “shift . from a book culture to an electronic culture @. 143) and echoes
Postman’s argument concerning the impact of the epistemology of television: “Not only has television displaced the
printed book with what are perceived as more attractive and effective forms of information, but it increasingly defines
what constitutes information and undemtanding” @. 146). Indeed, Keman attributes the demise of literature as a mean-
ingful activity (e.g. writing a poem, constructing a systematic poetics, interpreting literary texts, teaching literary works,
assembling literary histories) to the rise of electronic culture and with it the demise of the subject as individual. For a more
broad-based discussion of the role electronic communication (including television) has played in the dispersion of the
subject, see Poster (1990).
r* On the decontextuahzed nature of photographs, see also Barthes (1977) and Sontag (1977).
PICTURES AND THE
instancy introduced by telegraphy and photo-
graphy to exquisite perfection.t5 Television
pours forth thousands of images on any given day. The
average length of a shot on network is only 3.5 seconds,
so that the eye never rests, always has something new
to see. [Tlelevision offers viewers a variety of sub
ject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it,
and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
American television, in other words, is devoted entirely
to supplying its audience with entertainment (p. 86-
87).
Indeed, Postman contends that entertainment
is the “supra-ideology” of all discourse on tele-
vision and the values of television the values of
show business. The show-business bias of U.S.
television in itself, however, is not what con-
cerns Postman. Postman finds television at its
best when it is entertaining and at its worst
when it aspires to seriousness. Rather, it is
the fact that, as a media-metaphor, television
has made entertainment the natural format for
the presentation of all subject matter in Amer-
ica. All subjects of public interest in American
society, from politics to sports, find their way
onto television and thus are shaped by the bias
of television. Television, Postman asserts, “has
achieved the status of ‘meta-medium’ - an
instrument that directs not only our know-
ledge of the world, but our knowledge of
ways of knowing as well” (pp. 78-79).
Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing
about itself. Therefore - and this is the critical point -
how television stages the world becomes the model for
how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely
that on the television screen entertainment is the meta-
BOTTOM LINE 65
phor for ail discourse. It is that off the screen the same
metaphor prevails. Americans no longer talk to each
other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange
ideas; they exchange images (pp. 92-93).
Under the influence of the epistemology of
television, public discourse in America has
become the discourse of show business. To
be “valid”, it must be entertaining; conver-
sely, if it does not appear in an amusing or
attractive format or if the message is not instan-
taneous, that is, if it does not come packaged in
the rhetoric of television, it will not be
attended.
U.S. annual reports and the rhetoric of
television
Pictures, prizes, and gags. To be sure, Post-
man’s contention (1985) that any discourse
must be cast in a television format to be per-
ceived as valid, attributes the character of U.S.
public discourse to a single supra-ideology. In
this regard, Postman’s analysis overhomo-
genizes U.S. public discourse and the plurality
of ideologies that contributes to its structure(s).
Television epistemology constitutes only one
epistemology within a matrix of epistemo-
logies that may be adduced to enhance the
truth claims of a particular discourse. Exam-
ples of other powerful supra-ideologies that
inform public discourse in the United States
include those of science (McCloskey, 1985;
Klamer & McCloskey, 1992; Postman,
1992l3, quantification (Gould, 1981; Klamer
& McCloskey, 1992; Postman, 1992) sports
(Hargreaves, 1986; Wilber, 1988), celebrity
I5 Eilis (1982) and Fiske (1987) also strongly emphasize the discontinuous and segmented nature of television images. In
the words of Fiske (1987, p. 105)
[t]he television text is composed of a rapid succession of compressed vivid segments. Flow [as posited by
Wiiliams (1974) as the central television experience], with its connotations of a languid river, is perhaps an unfortunate
metaphor: the movement of the television text is discontinuous, interrupted, and segmented. Its attempts at closure, at
unitary meaning, or a unified viewing subject, are constantly subjected to fracturing forces.
For his part, Ellis (1982, p. 120) notes that even programs that have a high degree of coherence compared to, for example,
news and advertisements are highly segmented: “This segmentalisation takes the form of a rapid alternation between
scenes and frequent return to habitual locations and situations .”
I6 Postman (1992) critiques a number of technology-related supra-ideologies, includiig science, quantification, and com-
puters, that inform various categories of U.S. public discourse (e.g. medicine, education, management). Ironically, he
makes only passing mention of television.
66 0. F. GRAVES et ai.
(Goldsmith, 1983; Schickel, 1985), cultural
icons (Leiss, 1983; Ewen, 1988) and, more
recently, computers (Poster, 1990; Postman,
1992). The television epistemology implicated
in the visually engaging, entertaining formats
of contemporary U.S. annual reports, accord-
ingly, is only one aspect of the rhetoric of the
reports as a whole, one that complements and
reinforces, for example, the persuasion inher-
ing (socially) in the quantification of the
graphs, numerical tables, and accounts (Davis
et al ., 1982; Morgan, 1988; Hines, 1989; Gall-
hofer & Haslam, 1991)”
Yet recognizing the multidimensional&y of
the epistemologies of U.S. public discourse -
and concomitantly the multifacetedness of the
epistemologies of U.S. annual reports - does
not diminish the particular rhetorical power
the epistemology of television has assumed in
the United States. The American home is so
thoroughly saturated with television’8 that the
epistemology of the medium, again defined as
the assertion and regulation of truth by means
of the media-metaphors of imagery, entertain-
ment, and immediacy, will as a matter of course
have affected the mind-set of all sectors of U.S.
society (including the consumers of U.S. annual
reports”), and thus reverberate across all cate-
gories of U.S. public discourse.
U.S. annual reports, as one category of U.S.
public discourse, have been widely informed
by the epistemology of television since the
early 1960s. The glossy color pictures, lag-
niappes, and clever formats that have so often
characterized U.S. annual reports over the past
30 years are the rhetoric of show business,
meant to amuse and to entertain, much as the
“prize” in the cereal company’s annual report
in the cartoon described above. Indeed,
“prizes” in annual reports are not uncom-
mon. In 1968, for example,*’ The Ansul Com-
pany included fold-out posters by well-known,
contemporary artists in its report; and in 1974,
Norlin Corp., a producer of musical instru-
ments, enclosed its report in a record jacket
that also contained a long-playing record
album entitled “Music of America”. Inter-visual
Books, Inc., which publishes children’s novelty
books, inserted its 1992 report in a popup
book entitled Haunted House and distributed
the book along with the report.*’ whirlpool
Corporation affixed a working compass to its
1993 report (the text of the report contains a
statement of Whirlpool’s global strategy), while
the annual report for Reynolds Aluminum has
” The “intertextuality” (Barthes, 1975) of these supra-ideologies will be readily apparent. Computers imply quantification,
and quantification, science. Television, as a technology, also implies science, while sports for many Americans is essentially
a television experience (college football and basketball, NFL football, NBA basketball, NASCAR racing, Saturday afternoon
wrestling PGA golf, the U.S. Open, Wimbledon, the Olympics). Successful sports figures, in turn, are not infrequently
celebrities (Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Arnold Palmer, Chris Evert, Richard Petty) and team logos not infrequently
cultural icons (cf. the current popularity of NFL caps and jackets among young American males). ‘Ihe rhetoric of
sports, moreover, is often amplified via team or individual statistics, that is, by the rhetoric of quantification.
ts According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1993, p. 561) 98.3% of American homes reported owning at least one
television set in 1992. The average number of television sets in the American home that year, furthermore, was 2.1.
I9 Also according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1993, p. 561), 90.9% of a random sample of college graduates reported
viewing television during a specified time period in 1992. That percentage was only slightly less than the percentage for
high school graduates (94.2%).
a0 The following, Rhrstrative descriptions of annual reports arc based on those contained in Clagett & Hirasuna (1988) and
Rothman & DriscoU(l991) as well as the collection at the University of Mississippi. Clagett & Hirasuna contains numerous,
full color examples of striking visual design in annual reports.
*t The Wal l SmetJ ouml (27 May 1993) announced the publication of the Intervisual report under the inspired caption
“Pop Goes the Annual! “.
PICTURES AND THE BOmOM LINE 67
Fig. 2. Cracker B arrel Old Country Store, Inc. 1991 Annual Report. Cover with tomato seed packet
(Courtesy, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. 0 1991.)
riginal in color).
for the past several years contained coupons
worth 504 toward the purchase of the com-
pany’s aluminum foil, Cracker Barrel Old Coun-
try Store, Inc. attached a package of tomato
seed to the cover of its 1991 report (Pig. 2)
and an American Aeroshows pennant to the
cover of its 1992 report (Pig. 3). In the case
of Cracker Barrel, moreover, the “prizes” on
the covers of its reports served concretely to
introduce (and symbolize) the small-town,
family-values theme of the reports: the 1991
report contained pictures evoking 1940s rural
life accompanied by a text recalling entertain-
ing radio shows of the era, small-town parades,
and front porch story-telling and games. The
text of the 1992 report recalled aeroshows of
the 1940s and 1950s while the pictures
depicted children’s model airplanes as well as
air show events.
Nor have reports lacked for “gags”, a staple
genre of television comedy. Domino’s Pizza,
Inc. mailed its 1984 report in a domino game
0. F. GRAVES et al.
Fig. 3. crac :ker Barrel Old Country Store. Inc. 1992 Annual Report. Cover with Aeroshows pennant
(Courtesy, Cracker Barrel Old County Store, Inc. 0 1992.)
rIglnal In color).
box (which also contained a domino set), its
1985 report in a canvas newspaper pouch
(the report was in a newspaper format), and
its 1987 report in an order-out pizza box
(which also contained a puzzle of a pizza).
Famous Artists School, Inc. packaged its 1965
report as an old-fashioned, manual accounting
ledger whose covers were tied together with a
string; GENESCO, a shoe manufacturer, tied the
covers of its 1992 annual report together with a
shoe string laced through metal eyelets (Fig. 4);
and Foote, Cone & Belding Communications,
an advertising company, packaged its 1991
report in a jacket resembling a briefcase. The
contents of the report included a Creative
Report and a Financial Report both of whose
covers (back and front) displayed a portfolio of
the company’s advertising work. Other amus-
ing design formats have included holograms
(Intelstat Organization, 1990); intagLio work
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 69
Fig. 4. GENESCO, inc. 1992 Annual Report. Cover with shoe string and shoe-string eyelets (original in color). (Courtesy,
GENESCO. Inc. 0 1992.)
or embossing (Microsoft Corporation, 1991,
1993; MerrilI Lynch & Co., Inc., 1991; James
River Corporation, 1991, 1993; Kellogg Com-
pany, 1991; John Hancock Financial Services,
1993; Gerber Products Company, 1993); a
male nude “centerfold” (Beebok International
Ltd. (U.S.A.), 1990); the incorporation of pro
duct materials samples (Wolverine World
Wide, Inc., which manufactures outdoor foot-
wear, fashioned the cover of its 1993 report
from its Canyon Gold waterproof leather (the
caption inside the cover reads “You Can Judge
This Book By Its Cover”), and GENESCO, Inc.
provided a sample of its black dress shoe
leather (embossed with GENESCO’s logo) on
the cover of its 1993 report); paper-doll cutout
figures (Sara Lee Corporation, 1992 (see Fig.
5)); and cartoons or cartoon-like illustrations
@he AnsuI Company, 1966; Lomas and Nettle-
ton Mortgage Investors, Inc., 1977; McDonald’s
Corporation, 1990; Herman Miller, Inc., 1991).
Perhaps the apotheosis of television episte-
mology in U.S. annual reports, however,
occurred in the McDonald’s Corporation 1992
report. Shareholders received the report in a
video box containing, in addition to the flnan-
cial report and a fold-out poster of a Big Mac
(both printed in orange, purple, and teal blue
(Ronald McDonald’s colors)), a 15-minute
video message prepared expressly for televi-
sion viewing. On the video itself, TV broadcast
journalist Bill Kurtis leads a round-table discus
sion involving four McDonald’s executives
who, in television talk-show style, chat about
McDonald’s efforts to increase its share of the
world’s fast-food market. Making the “show”
seem even more authentic, the participants
twice break for made-for-television commer
cial messages or, as the transcript inserted in
the financial report would have it, McDonald’s
0. P. GRAVE.5 et al.
,) -_, = 8
Fig. 5. Sara Lee Corporation 1992 Annual Report. Paper-doll cutout figures identifying various Sara Lee-owned brand names
(original in color). (Courtesy, Sara Lee Corporation 0 1992.)
“value stories”. In the course of their discus
sions, moreover, the executives, very much in
the spirit of the whole affair, define “good
value” at McDonald’s as “something fun”,
including “the drive&us”, “the Playlands”,
and “the smile at the front counter”. The
actual financial statements and notes thereto,
moreover, are printed over muted, soft blue
images of various McDonald’s meals includ-
ing, Ater a&z, a box of Chicken McNuggets,
a Big Mac, and a carton of French fries bearing
the McDonald’s logo. The effect is to conflate
the accounts with a McDonald’s commercial
and, in the images of the Big Mac and the
Golden Arches on the carton of French fries,
the rhetorics of television and quantification
with the rhetoric of culturaI icons.
US. annual reports and tbe pbi l osopby of
the tel evi si on commerci al . The conflation of
McDonald’s 1992 accounts with images of the
company’s fast-food products reflects in parti-
cular an aspect of television epsistemology
Postman (1985, p. 130) terms “accommo
dation to the philosophy of the television com-
mercial’. This accommodation means, on the
one hand, substituting Images for verbal truth
claims (as in the McDonald’s report) and, on
the other, emphasizing brevity of expression.
The result is that emotive visual symbols and
one-line slogans are more and more displacing
proposition and argument as the primary fea-
tures of public discourse (Postman, 1985;
Jamieson, 1988; Kern, 1989). With regard to
annual reports, accommodation to the philo-
sophy of the television commercial is most
apparent in the compelling color pictures of
company products or people enjoying com-
pany products that fU the report pages and
not infrequently invoke the animation of televi-
sion. The smiling children and other family
members holding various Kellogg’s cereal
boxes in Kellogg’s 1991 report, for example,
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 71
Fig. 6. Kellogg Company 1991 Annual Report. Picture of child holding box of BKeilogg’s Corn Flakes (original in color).
(@Kellogg Company; 0 1992, Kellogg Company, used with permission. Any further use, reproduction, or distribution of
this slide is prohibited without prior written permission from Kellogg Company.)
appear as if framed by a television screen (see
Fig. 6). PepsiCo, Inc.‘s 1990 report “features a
sumo wrestler on the cover and romping
throughout the report. He’s pictured eating
-
or within chomping distance of - the com-
pany’s Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried
Chicken dishes” (Rothman & Driscoll, 1991;
see Fig. 7). Its 1991 report is even more ani-
mated by bunny family members skate-board-
ing (Pig. S), placing coins in a vending machine,
pushing a grocery cart filled with various corn
and potato chip products, and enjoying a picnic.
As to brevity of expression, net income -
“the bottom line” - apparently serves well as
the short and simple message contemporary
American report “readers” require.‘* In eam-
** Television epistemology, especially under the influence of the “Now this” mode of television newscasting (the
discontinuity implied by the juxtaposition of serious news stories and commercials), has shortened the American attention
span dramatically (Postman, 1985; Keman, 1990). According to Clagett & Hirasuna (1988) the average shareholder spends
less than 6 minutes “reading” an annual report; while according to Squiers (1989) 40% of stockholders spend 5 minutes or
less with annual reports. Neither author indicates what portion of that time is devoted to viewing pictures vs studying the
Bnancial information.
72 0. F. GRAVES et al.
Fig. 7. PepsiCo, Inc. 1990 Annual Report. Picture of Sumo wrestler enjoying slice of Pizza Hut pizza (original in color).
(Courtesy, PepsiCo, Inc. 0 1990.)
ings per share, moreover (lest one believe the
epistemology of television has not affected the
accounting calculus as well as its presentation),
the annual accounts have been distilled into an
even more instantaneous message worthy of
Pepsi Cola’s “Uh-huh”. The reader of South-
west Airlines Company’s 1990 report, how-
ever, did not even have to open the
company’s annual report and search for the
bottom line among the pictures: the cover pro
claims tersely, “In 1990, we made a profit”
(Fig. 9).23
U;S. annual reports and the pbi l osopby of
the tel evi si on newscast. Finahy, the epistemol-
ogy of television is evident in the glossy photo-
graphs of company board members and officers
that invariably appear in annual reports. For
Cooper et al ., the quality of these photographs
*3 For those who did open the report, there were several series of television-screen-shaped color frames with commercial
messages about the airline. In one of those series - one manifestly exemplifying the intertextuality of U.S. annual reports
- American baseball star and sports celebrity Nolan Ryan “pitches” the airline (Fig. 10).
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 73
Fig 8. PepsiCo, Inc. 1991 Annual Report. Picture of skate boarding bunny (original in color). (Courtesy, PepsiCo, Inc. 0
1991.)
represents the precision that the accounting
numbers - “the result of a hotchpotch of valua-
tion methods, legal requirements, accounting
standards and creative accounting” (p. 26) -
no longer do. “[E]ach pixel”, they write, “is in
precisely the right place . . If a patch of yel-
low were to appear in the chairman’s greying
hair it would be instantly noticeable” (ibid.).
Each pixel must indeed be in precisely the right
place in these photographs, but (we would
argue) for epistemological reasons. For the
well-groomed look of the men and women in
these photographs has the same semiotic
value’* as the good looks of newscasters on
television. As Postman explains, the perception
of the truth of a television news report rests
*4 For analyses of the semiotics of television, see Eco (1972) Fiske & Hartley (1978) and Seiter (1987). Good looks as a
signifier of veracity would seem to fail under the iconic sign, which Seiter explains as based on learned structural
resemblances. Applied to TV Images, iconic signs involve learning to recognize conventions of representation. One of
the characteristics of such representational codes, Seiter explains,
is that we tend not to recognize their use; they become as ‘natural” to us as the symbolic signs of language, and we
think of iconic signs as the most logical - sometimes as the only possible - way to signify aspects of our world (p. 22).
In this light, television itself, as a “natural” format for the ways Americans define and present their ideas of truth, is an
iconic sign on a grand scale. Postman does not address the matter of television and semiotics; he does associate the status of
television in America with Barthes’ (1957) principle of “myth”, that is, a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our
consciousness that it appears “natural”.
74 0. F. GRAVES et al.
Fig. 9. Southwest Airlines Co. 1990 Annual Report. Cover declaring a profit in 1990 (original in color). (Courtesy,
Southwest Airlines Co. 0 1990.)
heavily on the acceptability of the newcaster; And while corporate officers and board mem-
and in the show business culture of contempor- bers do not have to meet the same standard of
ary America, acceptability is a matter of looks. beauty newscasters do - most are middle-aged
An appropriate newscaster is one with a face or older already - they must be equally well-
that is both likable and credible. groomed and credible.
This means that you will exclude [from a cast of news- The credibility of the teller [according to the epistemol-
people] women who are not beautiful or who are over ogy of television] is the ultimate test of the truth of a
the age of hfty, men who are bald, all people who are proposition. “Credibility” here does not refer to the
overweight or whose noses are too long or whose eyes past record of the teller for making statements that
are too close together. You will try, in other words, to have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers
assemble a cast of talking hairdo’s (p. 100). only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulner-
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE
Fig. 10. Southwest Airhnes Co. 1990 Annual Report. Pictures of sports celebrity Nolan Ryan in series of TV-screen-shaped
frames (original in color). (Courtesy, Southwest Airlines Co. 0 1990 )
ability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed
members and officers in annual reoortsz5 is.
by the actor/reporter (Postman, p. 102).
then, ultimately a rhetorical strategy intended
to persuade the reader of the credibility of the
The inclusion of photographs of the board reports. In this respect, they complement the
25 For examples of especially compeBing photographs of Board Chairmen and CEOs in U.S. annual reports, see those of
Herbert D. Kelleher, Southwest Airlines Co. 1990 Annual Report; J.W. Marriott, Jr, Marriott Corporation 1991 Annual
Report; Drew Lewis, the Union Pacific Corporation 1991 Annual Report (Fig. 11); Nolan D. Archibald, Black & Decker 1991
Annu;ll Report; Wii D. Smithburg, The Quaker Oats Company 1992 Annual Report (Fig. 12); and Frederick W. Smith,
Federal Express Corporation 1993 Annual Report. For examples of group photographs of officers resembling TV news
76 0. F. GRAVES et al.
Fig. 11. Union Pacific Corporation 1991 Annual Report. Portrait of Drew Lewis, Chief Executive Officer (original in color).
(Courtesy, Union Pacific Corporation 0 1991.)
various other aspects of visual design in annual
reports so that together they serve the episte-
mological function of asserting the “truth” of
the reports.
PICTURES IN ANNUAL REPORTS AND THE
EMERGENCE OF TELEVISION;
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The early popularization of photography
itself apparently served as only a minor
impetus for the inclusion of pictures in annual
reports. Soon after the turn of the century,
picture-taking was a part of everyday U.S. life.
In 1900, the American inventor Frank Brownell
designed the Brownie camera, which became
available to the American public for $1.00 (a
roll of film sold for 15$), and Americans were
soon taking pictures as a popular pastime
(Schusteff, 1988). Yet most companies did
not begin using pictures in their annual reports
until World War II or the years immediately
afterward. (One notable exception is Swift &
Company, whose 1917 report contains pic-
tures.) To help document the time frame in
which pictures began to appear on a wide-
spread basis in annual reports, we examined
teams, see those in The Travelers Corporation 1990 Annual Report (Fig. 13), The Quaker Oats Company 1990 Annual
Report, the Rubbermaid, Inc. 1991 Annual Report, The Ford Motor Company 1992 Annual Report, and the Helene Curtis
Industries, Inc. 1993 Annual Report. The Sourthwest Airlines 1990 Report, in what may be a prime example of the “Now
. this” mode of discourse+ also includes a photograph of Herb KelIeher as a gyrating Elvis Impersonator. As a result of
such flamboyance, Kelleher has himself attained celebrity status (Hiestand, 1989; Wells, 1992; Donlon, 1992; Name
Dropping, 1992; Woodbury, 1993) so that the rhetoric of celebrity in the photograph is doubly persuasive.
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 77
Fig. 12. The Quaker Oats Company 1992 Annual Report. Portrait of William D. Smithburg, Chief Executive Officer (original
in black and white). (Reprinted with permission of The Quaker Oats Company 0 1992.)
the annual reports of 14 large U.S. companieP the two subsequent years. We also calculated
to determine the first occurrence of a photo- the size of a printed page and the number of
graph. We recorded the number and size of pages within each of the 3 years. For purposes
pictures in the iirst year of occurrence and in of comparison, we also calculated the size of
26 The companies included in our examination were those for which the University of Mississippi owns complete sets of
annual reports. The sample, therefore, is a convenience sample rather than a random one. The mix of companies included,
however (see Table l), represents a cross-section of important industries in the early and mid-1900s in the United States
(communications, steel, soft drinks, tires and rubber, automobiles, railroads, paper, and tobacco), and the companies
themselves are (or were) Large, infhtential companies.
78
Fig. 13 The Travelers Corporation 1990 Annual Report. Group portrait of company officers including Edward H. Budd
(seated center), Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (original in black and white). (Courtesy, The Travelers Corporation
0 1990.)
the printed page and number of pages for the 3 General Motors has previously been used in
years prior to the use of pictures in each of the studies dealing with pictures and values (Tin-
14 companies. The companies included in the ker 81 Neimark, 1987; Neimark, 1992) and may
survey appear in Table 1; the statistics relating serve as an example here. General Motors tirst
to the reports (in terms of averages for ah 14 used pictures in its 1941 report. It started with
companies) appear in Table 2.” two pages of pictures, each containing a col-
” The data for the companies on an individual basis appear in the Appendix.
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE
TABLE 1. List of companies
Company name
American Telephone and Telegraph
BethIehem Steel Corporation
Coca-Cola Company
Columbia Broadcasting
Firestone Tire t Rubber Company
General Motors Corporation
Illinois Central Railroad Company
International Paper Company
PhIllips Petroleum Company
RJ. Reynolds Tobacco Company
Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company
Union Pacific Railroad Company
United States Rubber (later Uniroyal)
United States Steel Corporation
Reporting years
1946-1951
1958-1%3
1952-1957
1949-1954
1928-1933
1938-1943
1942-1947
1938-1943
1942-1947
1949-1954
1944-1949
1948-1953
1947-1952
1937-1942
79
TABLE 2. Picture* USC In annual reports
Year of picture use for company 1st 2nd 3rd
Average number of pictures
per report 14 17 23.0t
Average area of pictures in
square inches 342 379 502
Average area of text in square
Inches not Including pictures 1442 1534 1547
Percentage of total area in pictures 19 20 24
Average total text area prior to pictures = 1367
square Inches
‘Photographs only.
$5ignificant difference at 0.1 level in comparison with 2nd year mean and at 0.05 level in comparison with 1st year mean.
lage of 10 or 11 small pictures (see Fig. 14). In
addition, a double-page graph indicating
increased wartime production is surrounded
by drawings depicting wartime products. All
of the pictures and drawings concern GM’s
contribution to the war effort. In the second
year of picture use, GM increased the picture
usage to 14 pages, with each page containing a
page-size picture. Aii 14 pictures promoted the
war effort. In the third year, GM changed the
size of its annual report. The size of the written
text increased from 4.5 inches by 7.25 inches
to 6.75 inches by 8.6 inches. The total text area
was then 50% greater than in the year before
pictures. The pictures generally bleed off the
edges, so that the 50% increase in report size
does not include the picture area beyond the
normal margin.
A second example, United States Rubber
Company, first included pictures in its annual
report in 1950 (see Figs 15 and 16). Prior to
that year, United States Rubber issued reports
of 17-21 pages in length with a text size of 6.5
inches by 9 inches. The 1950 report with pic-
tures was 28 pages long with a text size of 8.5
inches by 11 inches, a 113% increase. Almost
ali of the increase was occupied by pictures
and cartoons, which made up 68% of the total
report (62 pictures and drawings in all). Three
pages of cartoons lampooned Social Security,
0. F. GRAVES et al .
Fig. 14. Gent Motors Corporation 1941 Annual Report. Photographs depicting war production ac
black and white with blue trim). (General Motors Corporation, 1941.)
:th rities (origin Lal in
and three pages of pictures depicted successful
vegetable gardens. (United States Rubber man-
ufactured insecticides appropriate for garden
use). In its second and third year of including
pictures in its annual report, the company
reduced its text size to 7 inches by 8.5
inches, which was more typical of other firms,
and pictures occupied only approximately 20%
of the report.
Nineteen forty-seven was the average year of
first picture usage for the fourteen companies
whose reports we examined. The earliest use
was by Firestone Tire and Rubber (1931) and
the latest by Bethlehem Steel (1961). To the
extent that the practices of these companies
are indicative of the practices of large U.S. com-
panies, pictures began to Iind widespread use
in company annual reports in the United States
in the mid- to late 1940s.
The rise of television, too, dates from the late
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 81
Pig. 15. United States Rubber Company 1950 Annual Report. Photographs depicting a typical shareholder and a weekend
vegetable gardener (originals in black and white). (United States Rubber Company. 1950.)
1940s. The earliest television program aired in
July 1936, but commercial exploitation was
interrupted during World War II when the pro-
duction of television equipment was banned
(Winship, 1988). In the years following the
war, however, television began its march to
ubiquity in the American home:
When the war ended, the race to mass-produce televi-
sions and make commercial television a reality went
into full gear. At the time of Pear1 Harbor there had
only been a few hundred sets in the country. By 1947,
there were 170,000, and by the end of 1948, a quarter
of a milLion. Shows lie Milton Berle’s Texaco ,Star
neuter were emptying city streets on Tuesday
nights. A movie house manager in Ohio placed a
sign on his theater door: CLOSED TUESDAY - I
WANT TO SEE BBIUR, TOO! (Wiiship, 1988, p, 17).
82 0. F. GRAVES et al .
Fig. 16. United States Rubber Company 1950 Ammal Report. Photograph depicting fashions with rubber-soled shoes
(original in black and white). (United States Rubber Company, 1950.)
Winship (1988) notes that 1948 is most often Prize Playhouse. It was also the decade of
cited as the benchmark year for commercial Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, I
television, “the year when commercial televi- Love Lucy, Amos ‘n Andy, The Goldbergs,
sion finally took off” (p. 19). The 195Os, hvw- The Honeymooners, Bums and Allen, and
ever, were the Golden Age of Television IYbe J ack Benny Show. There were The Quiz
(Winship’s designation). The 1950s were the Kids, l%e Price is Right, The $64,000 Ques-
age of live drama on television including tion, Truth or Consequences, What’s My
Studio One, The US. Steel Hour, Kraft Tele- Line, T&e Lawrence Welk Show, Your Hit Par-
vfsfon i%eatre, The Alcoa Hour, and Pulitzer ade, The Ed Sullivan Show, American Band
PICTURES AND THE BOTTOM LINE 83
Stand, and The Mickey Mouse Club. Today and
The Jack Paar Show were born, as was the
evening news. Americans came to know the
world through television in the 195Os, and tele-
vision became their world. It was the decade
when Americans came to argue with good
looks, celebrities, and commercials, the dec-
ade when show business became a major for-
mat for public discourse.
The widespread use of pictures in annual
reports, then, appears to have coincided with
the advent of the Age of Television. And while
one must look to other elements of the relevant
institutional matrix to explain the inclusion of
photographs in annual reports in the 1940~,~~
including in particular technological advances
in photography and printing and the advent of
photo journalism (Clagett & Hirasuna, 1988)
the epistemology of television had begun to
transform the graphic design of those reports
by the close of the 1950s:
Despite the greater emphasis on visual communications
[in the late 1940s and 1950~1, annual reports remained
Largely fmancial documents until the late 1950s.
Ekginning around 1959 and into the mid-1960s several
seminal works established the direction of contempor-
ary annual reports. Graphic designer Paul Band
expressed IBM’s polished, progressive image through
striking typographic arrangements, coated paper
stock, the deliberate use of white space and dramatic
pictures by famous photographers. Robert Miles
Rtmyan’s still-life photos introduced a montage of stimu-
lating concepts in the 1959 Litton report. BrLk Nitsche
applied bold contemporary art techniques to the 1959
General Dynamics annual. These pivotal works pro-
foundly intluenced young graphic designers By the
mid-1970s the annual report emerged as possibly the
most important corporate marketing piece - a visual
statement of management goals and philosophy and
often a direct expression of the chief officer’s person-
ality and vision (Clagett & Hirasuna, 1988, pp. 16-17).
The development of sophisticated visual design
in annual reports, then, can be viewed as an
extension of the success of television; and the
epistemology of television, an institutional
moment that played a major role in shaping the
visual formats of U.S. annual reports. Historical
developments would seem to support the link.
CONCLUSION
This analysis began by “taking issue” with
Cooper et al. (1992), who attribute the inclu-
sion of pictures and other artwork in annual
reports to a purely aesthetic moment, a moment
intended to lill the vacuity of annual accounts
in the postmodem context and, at the same
time, to supplant the accounting numbers as
a mode d’assujettissement in the Foucauldian
sense. We have suggested that the aesthetic
moment alone does not sufficiently explain
the contingent and historically specific motiva-
tion for the inclusion of pictures and other
aspects of visual design in U.S. annual reports.
We have also questioned the appropriateness
of interpreting the U.S. report reader’s experi-
ence as a purely aesthetic, postmodem one.
Rather, we suggest that accounts have not
lost their claim to truth among the American
public and that the pictures and artwork of
annual reports serve the rhetorical purpose of
arguing the truth claims of those reports and
the social constructs they represent. We
further suggest, by appealing to Postman
(1985) that the pictures and artwork in U.S.
annual reports reflect the television epistemol-
ogy that permeates the various categories of
public discourse in America: in America,
among the public at large, “truth” is more
likely to be attended - and be more persuasive
zs See footnote 12 above. One could perhaps also include Hollywood as an institutional moment implicated in the early
inclusion of photographs in annual reports, the film industry having contributed to the reorientation of American culture
from the written word to visual imagery prior to the advent of television. The 1930s saw the blossoming of the tihn
industry, and 1939, the year of The Wfzurd of Oz, Gone wftb the Wfnd, Goodbye MY Cbf@, Son of Prankenstefn,
Stagecoach, and Mr. Smftb Goes to Wusbfngton, among other classics, was a Landmark year for that industry as well as
the eve of the widespread use of pictures in reports. Indeed, many of the photogmphs from the annual teports of the 1940s
and 1950s resemble the “stiBs” that adorned cinema marquees of the era.
a4 0. F. GRAVES et al.
- ifpresented in a television-based format, that
is, one that is entertaining. Hence, the glossi-
ness, color pictures, and clever formats of U.S.
annual reports as well as their rhetorical power.
Because of the rhetorical (and epistemologl-
Cal) function of entertaining visual formats in
U.S. annual reports, furthermore, we have sug-
gested that their purpose is, paradoxically, not
at all trivial. At the same time, however, the
paper recognizes that such formats may well
be tri vi aal z’zfng. Postman argues as much about
the effect of the epistemology of television on
the quality of U.S. intellectual life. For Postman,
the entertainment format that has transformed
U.S. public discourse into an adjunct of show
business threatens Americans’ very ability to
think. Because of the asyntactical nature of tel-
evision imagery, Americans are losing their
contextual understanding of the world, and
because television constantly juxtaposes the
grave with the banal (the “Now . . . this”
world view), Americans are losing their percep
tion of the world as a serious place. And if
information offered through the format of tele-
vision is decontextualized, it is self-justifying
and cannot be contradicted; and if such infor-
mation is not to be taken seriously anyway, it
does not warrant contradiction. The result is
that Americans are losing their capacity to
question, to discuss, to oppose. In short,
Americans are amusing themselves to death.
And how do Postman’s insights relate to U.S.
annual reports? If the television-based formats
of annual reports are a form of rhetoric unob-
trusively asserting the truth claims of those
reports, then recognition of the formats’ rheto-
rical function allows recognition of the truth
claims in the reports as argument, from indivi-
dual company values to the political economy
of the accounts themselves. Understanding the
truth claims of the reports as argument, in turn,
allows response and discussion. Postman opens
his book by noting that with the passing of
1984, Americans had quietly congratulated
themselves: the Orwellian prophecy had not
come to pass. But what Americans had forgot-
ten was the Huxleyan specter, that is, that ideas
would not be suppressed, but drowned in a sea
of irrelevance, that instead of a captive culture,
we would become a trivial culture. “In
[Orwell’s] 2984 [sic]“, Postman writes, “. . .
people are controlled by inflicting pain. in
[Huxley’s] Brave New Worl d, they are con-
trolled by inflicting pleasure” (p. viii>. Which
brings us back to Cooper et al . and the matter
of aestheticism as a Foucauldian mode d’assu-
j etti ssement. Perhaps the epistemology of tele-
vision is a particularly American (and modem)
form of the same control.
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