Sébastien Point

A letter from the president: seduction, charm and obfuscation in French CEO letters

Purpose – Shareholders, investors and potential employees, all attach special importance to understanding a company through its annual report, the status of which has evolved over the years: from providing information for the adepts of competitive intelligence, it now provides information available to all stakeholders in the company. But one aspect has not changed: the keynote message of the president that prefaces the annual report. The present article indicates current practice in the matter in the case of 28 leading French companies.Design/methodology/approach – We have made these companies the subject of a systematic and detailed computer‐assisted analysis.Findings – Among the main conclusions to be noted are: a varied range of rhetorical cosmetics by way of embellishment, and attitudes either of prudence or optimism on the part of company heads; a type of discourse open to several levels of interpretation: from a literal level to a level allowing the reader to interpret the wider spirit and intention...

Top pay transparency in Europe: codes, convergence and clichés

Following the waves of corporate scandals and the increasing attention to corporate governance, the transparency of reporting on director-level pay has increased across Europe. This article examines the extent of convergence in laws, codes and corporate reporting practices in regard to director-level pay in France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. The paper analyses annual reports and the websites of 23 companies, using institutional theory to discuss the coercive, normative and mimetic pressures for convergence that are revealed, not just in the laws and codes in each country, but also in the standardized wording in the relevant sections of reports which have become clichés.

What Do French Annual Reports Reveal About the Internationalisation of Companies

The current strategies used by companies emphasise the international dimension. There is an increasing trend for larger French companies to merge and enter into joint ventures with other European counterparts. If French companies are more and more concerned about conducting international activities, how do they communicate this dimension to their stakeholders through annual reports? From a consideration of the aims of these reports which highlights the difficulties in disclosing sensitive information, this paper gives a typology of disclosures in the annual reports of 42 leading French companies. This shows that the companies sometimes did not disclose as much information as they could about the international dimension of the firm, but sometimes they provided overwhelming information. The French leading companies seem to emphasise descriptive information (about their foreign activities and the results or their internationally diverse partnerships) rather than information concerning international human resource management or international growth opportunities.

Legitimacy profiles of women directors on top French company boards

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to question the profiles of female directors on top French company boards. It explores the legitimacy attributes of current female directors to identify the profiles sought recently, as firms approach the need to make many new appointments to fulfill gender quotas for supervisory boards, given that the proportion of women on a corporate board must reach 40 percent by 2017, with an intermediate level of 20 percent by 2014. Design/methodology/approach – The authors gathered numerical and qualitative biographical data on all SBF 120 (French stock exchange index) firms’ female directors from annual reports and web sites over seven years (from 2003 to 2009). The authors constructed an SPSS database to categorize the individuals into various orders of legitimacy. Findings – Drawing on director bio-data, the authors extend previous work on four legitimacy assets (family ownership; academic excellence; strong ties to the State; and top career), by adding a fifth asset (repre...

French supervisory board gender composition and quota threat: changes from 2008 to 2010

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how an environmental threat (possible quotas for female supervisory directors) might change supervisory board gender composition in SBF120 French company boards between 2008 and 2010. Design/methodology/approach – From a census of supervisory board membership of SBF120 companies in France in January 2008 and December 2010, data were obtained to test hypotheses relating to changes in gender composition of boards and demographic differences between new and earlier director appointees. The authors drew on institutional theory to inform the discussion of this paper’s findings. Findings – The authors reveal significant increases over 2008-2010 in SBF120 board female representation and significant cohort differences between recent and earlier appointees. Newer female appointees differed from male peers and from earlier appointed females and males, bringing youth and international experience. New females were more likely to gain CAC40 seats than their male peers....

Convincing Qualitative Research: What Constitutes Persuasive Writing?

We review ontological, epistemological, and methodological concerns in writing up research, distilled from selected inductive studies published in leading academic journals. From this analysis of practices emerges the following categorization, (a) rhetoric, (b) craftsmanship, (c) authenticity, (d) reflexivity, and (e) imagination, which informs the writing up of appealing and convincing qualitative research. We give examples and propose actionable writing heuristics. We offer reflections and recommendations on how qualitative research writing could be improved and its diffusion accelerated.

Accountability ou rendre des " contes ". L'exemple des dirigeants du SBF 120

Cet article propose une lecture des lettres des presidents des entreprises du SBF 120 en mobilisant le cadre theorique de Greimas, appele schema actantiel. Les informations narratives apparaissent regies selon une logique de reddition des comptes, contingente par rapport a la strategie poursuivie, et aux proprietes de taille ou de performance des entreprises ; elles obeissent aussi a la codification sous-jacente d’un conte, qui permet de mieux en comprendre la structure.

Individual Offshoring: An Emerging Trend for Global Careers

The international human resource management (IHRM) literature tends to develop various forms of international contracts (see Dickmann and Baruch, 2011, for an exhaustive review) in order to increase retention post expatriation and limit the challenges linked to repatriation (Mayerhofer et al., 2004). Nevertheless, to date and to our knowledge, a new form of expatriation rarely highlighted in the literature and somehow quite similar to classic expatriation is emerging: ‘individual offshoring.’ This new form of international assignment offers a relatively limited benefit package in comparison to the classic expatriation. In other words, as highlighted in this case study, individual offshoring aims at performing the exact same job abroad with a permanent geographical relocation. Nevertheless, it encompasses less-attractive packages compared to other forms of international assignments (IAs). It also offers no guarantee of return and it does not take the family into consideration even though this is considered as important in the expatriation literature (Dickmann and Baruch, 2011; Al Ariss and Crowley-Henry, 2013).