Niklas Sandell
Senior lecturer
The development of a multidimensional meaning of tax: From unfair tax to fair
Author
Summary, in English
Historically, companies have communicated taxes as a burden, as the benefits provided by governments are not perceived to be in proportion to their payments. With sustainable development becoming central in many policy areas, new discourses including ‘fair’ or ‘sustainable’ tax have become omnipresent in public talk on taxes. This paper analyzes tax discourses in corporate annual reports within this changing context to examine the use of language in the construction of the meaning of tax. By analyzing tax reporting by a state-owned multinational company over two decades, we observe that the communication of taxes increased in both number and types of discourses. Importantly, this highlights the shift in tax discourses from one dominated by codified accounting discourse reinforcing the monolithic representation of tax as an unfair expense, to one where tax is given a multidimensional meaning within a broader discursive context, where tax is a meaningful corporate responsibility to society.
Department/s
- Department of Business Law
- Accounting and Corporate Finance
- Department of Economics
Publishing year
2023-02
Language
English
Pages
57-76
Publication/Series
Discourse & Communication
Volume
17
Issue
1
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Topic
- Business Administration
Keywords
- Accounting
- Annual report
- Discourse analysis
- Fair tax
- Financial communication
- Intertextuality
- Language
- Longitudinal studies
- Recontextualization
- Sustainability
- Tax
- Accounting
- annual report
- discourse analysis
- fair tax
- financial communication
- intertextuality
- language
- longitudinal studies
- recontextualization
- sustainability
- tax
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1750-4813