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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the non-essence of accounting by focusing on financial accounting’s distinct technology: financial statements. Complementing the genealogical perspective on accounting’s changing socio-historical settings, it proposes a semiotic perspective on the accounting statement.

The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach in the theoretical framing of IFRS recognition and measurement principles that underlie the statement of financial position. It mobilises Saussure and Barthes’ sign theory – semiology, as it provides a meaningful delineation of financial accounting, bringing out its distinct numerical-linguistic knowledge-construction operation.

In addition to the justification of employing semiology as a parent discipline for accounting, it is shown how IASB’s recognition and measurement procedures manifest the interrelated non-essentialist semiological principles of reciprocal articulation and value constellation. Accounting entries (“expression”) are not representations of pre-existing economic resources (“content”), but rather both are mutually constituted by delimiting the resource/asset from its broader category. Such judgment-based articulation results with value constellations, where asset value is merely a relational product of other values.

To the long-established critique that accounting has no essence, the paper adds a formulation of a non-essentialist semiotic logic: the financial statement’s semio-logic. It further sheds light on the role of such logic as an epistemological presupposition to the accounting – society reciprocity, where accounting is a malleable product of, and is used to exert power over, its social surroundings.

This article considers the attempted change to the image of an established brand by studying the semiotics within the brand’s historical advertising campaigns. The use of semiotics to study the interpretation of messages is discussed, and the link between interpretation of messages and advertising effectiveness in changing brand image is explored. The authors deconstruct advertisements of a brand to provide a model containing opposing dialectics that may aid managers by highlighting alternative symbolic messages contained in advertisements. Oncwe identified, these alternative symbolic messages may be used to help change brand image and influence advertising effectiveness. Although the study focuses upon a major brand of beer, this is an industry in which there are numerous small firms, and many of those have constrained marketing budgets, and thus need to make sure that their advertising is effective. Equally, entrepreneurial marketing is not to found only in the small firm, and the case study discusses a radical and imaginative brand repositioning of a well established product.

Despite the attention that Charles Sanders Peirce and Herbert Blumer dedicated to semiosis, symbolic interactionism still clearly lacks a theory of the sign. Attempts to appropriate Saussurean semiology and deconstruction have been made, but these have often resulted in, respectively, denying the importance of interaction and interpretation, or in implying the demise of meaning. In this article I propose an interpretive analytics of the sign by building upon Peircean semiotics and social semiotics. I examine the sign as a tripartite process of relations among object, representamen, and interpretant and analyze processes of production, distribution, and consumption of signs, and how these processes are shaped by power dynamics. I discuss how socio-semiotic codes are constituted through specific ideological discursive practices, and how these discursive practices are contingent on exo-semiotic conditions. Finally, I reflect on the importance of this approach for the continued growth of symbolic interactionism.

Sketching is a creative skill that most architects develop over their long period of study and is considered an effective medium for communicating imaginative thinking and conceptual ideas in architecture. As a concept, mood is generally associated with imagining specific ambiance and spatial experience during the schematic phase of the architectural design process. While most architectural research on mood revolves around post-occupancy evaluation, colour effect and lighting comfort, few studies have been conducted to systematically investigate conceptual issues related to mood imagination. Besides, there has been little attempt to appreciate sketches as a reliable conceptual data source for architectural research.

To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper explores a semiological analysis of mood visualisation using architectural sketches. By framing the experiment within the architecture education context, the paper begins by discussing the relationship between sketching, mood and semiology in architecture. The discussion continues by highlighting methodological issues in the design of our experiment. The experiment comprised architecture students from undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Following the visual and textual data derived from the experiment, two semiological analyses, namely, mood sign analysis and mood signifier analysis, were conducted to understand their imaginative thinking.

The results revealed significant preferential differences between the students on the use of specific semiotic representation and design language to conceptualise their mood idea.

As a preliminary experiment, this study constitutes an early attempt to further explore potential research related to architectural sketches and the creative imagination that may be beneficial to designers, art psychologists, educators and researchers alike.

Only few festival studies in the Philippines attempted to examine the capability of festivals as folk media to communicate development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development-oriented activities and messages in the San Isidro Pahiyas Festival in Lucban, Quezon.

The researcher conducted participant observation, ethnographic photography, key informant interview and record review. A historical analysis of the festival’s background, thematic analysis of its list of programs, visual analysis of the photographs guided by Barthes’ (1964) semiology and hermeneutics were employed.

Formerly a native ritual before the Hispanic rule in the country, the San Isidro Pahiyas Festival is currently held by the Local Government of Lucban, Quezon, primarily for touristic purposes. The festival’s activities in 2015 reflected the municipality’s dependence on agriculture and the residents’ religiosity, skills and creativity. The adornments during the said celebration likewise gave a glimpse of the residents’ social status, livelihood sources and reverence to Saint Isidore. Through hermeneutics, the researcher also found issues on the residents’ idolatry and their motivation to display their produce during the festival.

The findings of this study can only hold true for the 2015 celebration of the San Isidro Pahiyas Festival. Despite this, the study finds hermeneutics and Barthes’ (1964) semiology useful for festival studies. It also appeals to folk media studies and postcolonial theories.

This research provides an unconventional methodology for festival studies, which contributes to the very limited hermeneutic tourism studies abroad and folk media studies in the Philippines.

From an interpretive semiology perspective this paper examines the meaning suggested by the absence of children in newspaper advertisements, commercial websites and catalogue images of children’s furniture manufacturers. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the multilayered process involved in conveying meaning to the “parent-child cluster” consumer through press and online advertisements designed by children’s furniture manufacturers.

A corpus of 200 press advertisements and catalogues produced by children's furniture manufacturers (particularly IKEA and Gautier) was analysed using a combination of Barthes’ (1964) visual analysis and Greimas’ (1987) narrative approach to visual discourses.

The scenes portrayed to shape the message addressed to the “parent-child cluster“ consumer, suggest that, in addition to fostering positive values such as self-fulfilment and stimulating background for an active child, they also promote discourses about contemporary childhood and parenthood.

This paper highlights how furniture retailers through the figurative choices they make to portray a child bedroom and to organize a series of child bedroom images within a catalogue, generate a brand discourse aiming to typify representations of childhood imbued with diverse cognitive, social and emotional dimensions within diverse cultural backgrounds.

The impact of colour is acknowledged within the marketing field. However, research on colour communication is limited, with most prior studies focusing on pre-defined meanings or colour associations. The purpose of this paper is to reveal insights into colour meaning and propose an alternative view to understanding colour communication.

The study takes a conceptual approach and proposes Peircean semiotics to understand colour communication. The proposed framework is applied to analyse a set of colour meanings detected by prior colour research.

The study elucidates the underlying mechanism of how colour is read and interpreted in various marketing activities, and how meaning is conveyed. This study addresses this mechanism by identifying colour semantics and colour as a symbolic, iconic and indexical sign.

The study contributes to the scholarly knowledge of colour in marketing. It enriches the understanding of how consumers interpret representations of single visual signs expressed in contexts such as products, brands and brand packaging to make informed product decisions.

By understanding consumer interpretation as a stage in the communication process, marketers can develop more informed marketing activities to communicate the intended meanings. This may well strengthen the brand identity and contribute to the perceived brand value.

By elaborating on how colours convey meanings and the mechanism that explains such meanings, this study demonstrates that colour meaning is far more than mere association. The study contributes to the current knowledge of colour by facilitating a deeper understanding of how consumers interpret representations of single visual cues expressed in various contexts.

This conceptual paper aims to present a research paradigm for international business communication research, with special reference to the problems of Japanese corporations.

To develop a paradigm, international business communication first is defined, and the obstacles Japanese corporations face in international business are described, as are the methods used to deal with obstacles and foster better global management and intercultural communication. The key issue of developing training programs is emphasized. To systematize international business communication research with reference to Japanese companies, a research agenda is offered involving study of: correct usage of English, the meanings of international business terms, and the relationship of English as an international business language to its various users. The guiding theories in this research will come from semiology.

English will be the agent of globalization, and Japanese companies must accept this reality and deal with it. So far, they have not yet developed a satisfactory way of doing so. However, appropriate methodologies are available, as presented in the paper.

Japanese companies have lagged behind European and US companies in coping with the communication problems fostered by globalization. This paper sets out a methodology for developing the research needed to yield practical steps to solve the problem.

The paper offers a model of ways to systematize international business communication research so that Japanese companies can develop ways of coping with the communication problems of globalization.

The purpose of this paper is first to provide a critical conceptual discussion of different use of the notion of text, especially in the case of expressions including words as well as images, second to consider the notion of document as an alternative to the notion of text, and finally to lay out a theoretical ground for a broad discipline of documentation studies.

The approach took the form of a conceptual analysis of a number of works in media and literary studies.

There were found a number of cases of contradictory use of the notion of text within the same work, talking about text in a broad overall sense covering all media as well as text as a distinctive concept separating words from images, while it was found through a conceptual history of the notion of document that the latter notion not only covers a written paper, but multiple media.

In future research, one should consider the use of document as the concept for the expressions as a whole and dedicate the notion of text solely for the verbal part of the expressions and make more empirical analysis within this conceptual framework to see if it makes a difference in practice to change the overall concept from text to document.

Having a broad concept of document, it would be possible to be more flexible regarding the choose of proper media for documentation.

By making a critique of the notion of text and suggesting a broader concept of document as well as documentation, the paper provides a ground for reconsidering the classical disciplinary structure, divided into humanities as well as the information sciences and social sciences.