Discourse and the Projection of Corporate Culture: The Mission Statement

Abstract

This article explores how corporations project their corporate philosophy through `Mission Statements'. Linguistic and textual analysis of such statements drawn from a sizeable corpus allows us to typify the texts as constituting a non-routine, organizational genre, and one that has recently become of some significance. This discussion serves as a foundation for a contextual and intertextual analysis (cf. Fairclough, 1992) of Mission Statements from two well-known US companies. By detailing the history, rationale and role of these Mission Statements we indicate how the texts are rhetorically designed in order to ensure maximum employee `buy-in'. Despite linguistic and rhetorical similarities among the texts, an exploration of context reveals startling differences in communicative purpose. In one case the Mission Statement emerges as an empowering historical vision to be protected and nurtured through all vicissitudes; in the other case, the rewriting of the Mission Statement emerges as a collaborative response to crisis. The article ends by discussing the implications of such findings for contemporary approaches to discourse and genre analysis within institutional linguistics.