Transparency and Disclosure in Swedish State-owned Enterprises

Sammanfattning: There is a disagreement between the principles of corporate governance, which promote a transparent corporate disclosure, and the studies of business communication, which show an increasing trend in how a marketing function crowds out the transparency function of corporate disclosure. While this marketing function might be interpreted as a means towards attracting new investors, it could suggest that the marketing function has less impact on companies without investors, such as State-owned Enterprises (SOEs). In order to test the mechanisms of this disagreement, a case comparison is made to test the transparency and disclosure of three companies over a 10-year period. All three companies are actors in the Scandinavian travel industry with different levels of state ownership (100%, 50 %, and 0 %). The methodology is based on a combination of stakeholder theory, critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis. The paper found that while the disclosure of the 100 % state owned company could be explained with the corporate governance framework, the 0 % could not. This instead corresponded well with the marketing function. The transparency in the 50 % SOE seemed to be partly explained by both. The corporate disclosure in the mixed SOE might thus be considered as a hybrid-product of the marketing-function and the transparency-function. Possible explanations and future research are discussed.