‘Repetition’ in social and environmental reports: at the intersection of Hume’s and Goffman’s concepts of impressions

Pesci, Caterina, Costa, Ericka and Soobaroyen, Teerooven (2014) ‘Repetition’ in social and environmental reports: at the intersection of Hume’s and Goffman’s concepts of impressions. 26th International Congress on Social and Environmental Accounting Research, St Andrews, United Kingdom. 25 - 28 Aug 2014.

Abstract

The focus of the paper is the use of repetition - considered both in narrative and visual disclosures - in the social and environmental reports of non-profit Cooperative Banks. The paper investigates the role of repetition as a rhetorical device helping the process of knowledge acquisition according to the two different perspectives of Goffman (1959) and Hume (1739). Starting from Hume’s (1739) philosophical idea of an impression, and the linguistic concept of repetition, we propose to classify repetitions into ‘simple’, ‘complex’ and ‘redundant’. The empirical element of this study is drawn from a sample of 86 Cooperative Banks of Northern Italy and the target documents analysed are the stand alone social and environmental reports. By analyzing our data it appears that Cooperative Banks combine different devices of repetition to convey a message of emphasis. All the forms of repetition (simple, complex and redundant) are found to be widespread in the social and environmental reports. The paper seeks to contribute to the literature by offering an alternative possibility of interpreting accounting data using an interdisciplinary perspective which seeks to link philosophy, sociology and linguistics in order to offer a credible explanation of a complex concept such as repetition.

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Contributors

Author: Teerooven Soobaroyen

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