Additional technical problems faced:

i. Utilizing content providers correctly: A decision had to be made concerning the best

system to use: ProQuest or Factiva? In due course, the finding was that Factiva was better. Also a challenge at first was to find the best way to generate content from searches carried out. After trial and error, the finding was that the single search term ‘corporate governance’ gave the most effective results and that generated content that allowed independent assessment of the frequency of VRTs and DimSyns.

128

Additionally, as a term, the finding was that ‘corporate governance’ also had the added feature that needed employment: that it did not contain any of the VRT or DimSyn terms.

ii. Forming and using a specialized corpus for frequency analysis in this research:

Specialized corpuses proved a vital factor in this kind of investigation. And it is something that had to be constructed. It is particularly important too since this investigation is heavily company-focussed and the requirement was the assessment of change in bias within these (and peripheral stakeholder) organizations.

iii. Term size: A range of terms were generated for VRTs and DimSyns (see Appendix

4). These included single word terms and multiple word terms. For VRTs for example: cash, earnings, margin, business strategy, sustainable advantage, and

strategic management. For the time horizon DimSyns, there were potential terms

such as: brief, persistent, fast-track, and slow deployment. It would be useful to use multiple word terms to obtain a more rounded view of how companies think. But in practice, single word terms are far more prevalent in annual reports – something all companies produce – so there is little choice other than to use them.

iv. Problems with term meanings: One of the biggest issues that had initially required

grappling with related to value primacy definitions: The corporate governance literature uses several terms related to corporate stakeholders, but often somewhat loosely. Shareholder value, for example, may also mean shareholder primacy or

shareholder value primacy; and similarly where the stress is on stakeholders as the

central terminology of use ie stakeholder value and stakeholder value primacy, and so forth. The same is true if the use of terminology for shareholder value

129

maximisation is considered. And for companies themselves, there is often a

difference between corporate value (a monetary amount) and corporate values (the core philosophies that drive a company’s conduct, and in many cases espoused through their mission statement). The addition of one letter, an ‘s’, makes a

considerable difference to perceived meaning – particularly for those working in the corporate world. Although just to confuse things, a corporate value could also mean one core value in a list of corporate core values. Similarly, an understanding of corporate value may be purely from an accounting point of view; eg the present

value of all cash flows before the planning horizon plus the present value of all

predicted cash flows after the planning horizon.

While in many cases of analytical research a consideration of these types of nuances might not matter much here a way was needed to pick this apart

linguistically so that it could be seen exactly how perception was actually being impacted and who exactly was being impacted. It was, therefore, necessary to address the degree of blurring. And as a result, the conception used of measurement variables was as dimensions. And the dimension chosen of shareholder primacy and

stakeholder primacy (corporate governance dimension) refer, always, to categories of

individuals – eg investor, manager, owner, and so forth. In the same way, when considering long-term or short-term or urgent to act and non-urgent to act (temporal dimension) it refers to a perception or related affect. And then, likewise, another measurement variable, a value-related term, was then always a descriptor of a

generally accepted term used to mean value in some form, such as share or earnings. There could be theoretical controversy or debate over a value-related term’s usage as to its being truly reflective of value (eg price v efficiency) but all these value-related terms deemed acceptable for the master list played in to the concept of value through

130

a wide-ranging perspective of how such terms are used by different constituencies when talking about corporate value.

v. Handling document word bias: Such as where there is a differential appearance of

particular terms in different documents. Eg ‘price’ may appear more in a company report than in a regulatory report. All terms that are comparable in some way are important to tell us the narrative differences of interested, and most usefully compared to highlight the narrative of a particular set of terms to reflect a mass perception. Bearing in mind there is an external choosing of terms, the idea was to find a term that best reflects the content of all the material examined.

vi. Term noise: For example, ‘share’ can mean I will share with you, or it can mean a

share of a company. In constructing the frequency list, these terms all required

checking. Also considered was term context. This becomes relevant when examining phrases like ‘short-term’, where the context could be positive or negative, as in the

company has shown short-term success v the company has been a complete failure

in the short-term. Another, issue to contend with was how to handle word variants. It

was not an issue for all terms chosen for VRTs and DimSyns but where applicable a set of rules about what to include had to be set – and the solutions was to be

consistent in applying the rules. Included with ‘environment’, for example, were ‘environments’, ‘environmental’, and ‘environmentally’.

vii. Corporate dataset orientation concerns: Though this research has focussed on UK

FT250 listed companies, in reality big companies frequently have global operations, and are not only UK-oriented.The upshot of the situation is that, while quite

131

that way, it is nevertheless difficult to get a fully UK-centric view of business from them. This is something that can potentially bias the results in the sense that any study of this nature can never truly be about a total UK perspective of how UK companies perceive value.

viii. Validity concerns when comparing time periods: How certain, for example, might

the thinking be that any difference – or movement in term perception – found between the two time periods looked at are a valid reflection of any change caused by the Crash of 2008? In reality, as with any scientifically rigorous correlational analysis there cannot be an ascription of causal reasons; that the Crash altered

corporate perception concerning the value narrative cannot be said in absolute terms. What can be said, however, is that a relationship is observable. And because the Crash was the biggest event between the time periods examined, the assertion that the Crash is a major associated factor in changing perception amongst corporate executives as well as other stakeholders – rather than a cause – has considerable validity.