Escolhas lingüísticas,custos políticos e gerenciamento da imagem corporativa:o caso da Aracruz Celulose S. A

In this work we introduce a procedure to investigate disclosure quality in the context of accounting narratives presented in the corporate annual reports. The procedure incorporates the implications of political costs to the quality of information presented in the annual reports. We confronted the theoretical propositions that were built upon the functional grammar, a systemic theory developed by Halliday (1976, 1978, 1985a, 1985b) with empirical data collected from the Aracruz Celulose?s S.A. annual reports from 1998 to 2006. The analysis was centered on the interpretation of both syntactic and semantic functions that were used to favor particular ways of sense making when one is reading the annual reports. Aracruz Celulose was chosen due to a combination of enduring high performance and assumed high levels of political costs resulting both from environmental issues and from conflicts with native communities. The theoretical propositions were observed to be convergent with empirical evidences, in which the results suggest that the company predominantly attempts to give emphasis to its institutional identity by means of intensification, circumstantiation and reinforcements of its realizations. With respect to image management, we observed a clear intention of favor its institutional perspective, since the presentation of themes related to conflicts with native communities were presented in a way that imposes to the reader the company?s particular way of appraise the facts. This behavior is not congruent with a neutral presentation of information in annual reports.