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| Author(s): |
Fernando Henrique Camara Gouveia
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade (FEA/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2010-10-27 |
| Examining board members: |
Eliseu Martins;
Luiz Paulo Lopes Favero;
Maria Clotilde Perez Rodrigues Bairon Sant\'Anna
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| Advisor: | Eliseu Martins |
| Abstract | |
Approached as business language, Accounting is considered a code system which allows communication between company administration and the actual or potential users of the information generated by the first. This proposition becomes more relevant when both the doctrine and regulation organs point out that communicating is itself the purpose of Accounting. Accounting is also recognized as a linguistic manifestation as it presents common aspects with other languages. Inserted in this context, several studies propose the use of semiotic and communication theories to accomplish accounting research, considering not only numeric information of financial statements but also terminology, texts, graphs and images employed in these demonstrations and in other narratives that compound the disclosure of a corporation. There have been empirical studies on this approach since the 1970s, and research on this field has been done frequently in Brazil at least for a decade. Thus, this work aims to accomplish a review of articles published in journals, Brazilian congresses, theses and dissertations presented in graduation programs evaluated by Capes to answer the following question: what is the state-of-art of Accounting research in Brazil based upon semiotic and communication theories? Twenty-two works have been collected, among these eighteen unpublished works, which have been divided into six categories, according to the research problem in focus, being them: theoretical, technical terminology comprehension, meaning evolution, reports understandability, faithful representation and influence on stock prices. Theoretical works suggest the use of semiotic and communication concepts to investigate if Accounting reaches its aims. Such works generally study comprehensibility associated with the level of sophistication of users and faithful representation linked to information relevance. Empirical works found evidence that users do not comprehend some terms employed on accounting reports, or still hold different conceptions about them. In addition accounting narratives can be considered difficult to read and knowledge and schooling of users affect the comprehensibility. Also, there are evidences of manipulation on the way narrative reports are elaborated and pessimism in accounting narratives influence the market value of companies. It has also been identified the significance of historical evolution of a term or expression to understand the concept or meaning that society applies to it. Concerning the methodology employed, there has been observed a great variety of inferential statistic resources employed to approach the research questioning. Questionnaire and contents analysis (both thematic and syntactic) were the techniques more frequently used, often associated to methods of statistic inference. Theoretical works have more often referred to semiotic and communication theories. However, empirical works do not approach such theories themselves although they do approach Accounting as a language or as somewhat relevant to communication process between administration and users. At last, some guidance to national research has been provided. Possibilities for research have potential to be enlarged, both for the variety of accounting narratives that can be investigated or for the study focus, which may not concentrate on narratives or still for the perspective of the research. There is also the possibility of studying the theoretical framework on semiotic and communication sciences more deeply, which seem to be underutilized in some studies. (AU) | |