Search results

The contemporary business world has been facing mounting criticism for quite a long time. The accusations relate to the short-sightedness of business decisions, strategies oriented solely to profit-making, hostile takeovers, a focus on cost reduction, employee redundancies, etc. This has led to a decline in trust towards business executives, as shown, for example, by the 2016 GfK Trust Index based on research conducted in 27 countries, including 13 European ones. According to the survey, managers and entrepreneurs are ranked 22nd out of 32 professions analysed (Trust in Professions, 2016). This relatively low level of trust in business managers, coupled with the new challenges created by a changing business environment which managers must cope with in order to stay in the market, means that contemporary companies have to change. Corporations are increasingly being challenged as to their function in society. Entrepreneurs must face the challenges connected not only with increasing competition or the development of new technologies, but also growing social expectations. This means that companies today must be managed not only effectively, but also responsibly. This chapter will present the findings of research on the place of sustainability marketing activities in the system of goals for contemporary organizations. To begin with, market trends will be discussed, which in today’s world to the greatest extent influence the marketing strategies of small and medium-sized enterprises in the food and drink sector, as well as the challenges such companies face nowadays. Next, a change in the significance of the strategic goals that these companies set for themselves will be discussed. The final part of the chapter will focus on sustainability aspects in the strategies adopted by SMEs.

One of the most colorful and free‐spirited publishers in U.S. history, the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company of Chicago has also made an impressive mark on that history. As this country's oldest alternative publishing house—founded in 1886—it has been closely associated with such movements as populism, freethought, socialism, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as well as various currents of labor and social radicalism of more recent years. The Kerr Company has also established itself as a leading publisher of original works and reprints in the field of labor and radical history. Several generations of America's progressives and dissidents have relied heavily on Kerr publications for their education and inspiration. For libraries with a focus on labor, politics, women, reform movements, anarchism, socialism, pacifism, radical fiction, popular culture, and the broad counter‐culture, Kerr books are indispensable.

This study examines comprehensiveness and responsiveness of mission statements for the top 100 retailers on the 2020 National Retailers Federation list in order to (1) evaluate how effectively they communicate organizational identity, values and purpose, (2) underscore a distinctive commitment to stakeholders and (3) what extent these efforts are reflected in revised mission statements or addenda to meet global pandemic challenges.

The study employs a 4-question metric to measure comprehensiveness and a two-pronged qualitative method of analysis consisting of keyword searches followed by content analysis.

Retailer statements are considerably comprehensive in describing purpose and audience yet very few articulate stakeholder value, differentiate themselves as distinctive or substantively reaffirm their core mission and values. Retailers seem more invested in strategic communication around diversity, equity and inclusion, based on web content in their consumer, job seeker and investor touchpoints.

Coding and interpreting language through content analysis methods may introduce some level of subjectivity, particularly when dealing with unstructured data. Implications for how organizations acclimated in order to survive and thrive, while maintaining focus on stakeholders and strategy. Examining organizational mission statements and their contexts yields perspective into how organizations define themselves and what they do during times of crisis.

This study provides insights into the content, structure and functions of the statements against a specific comprehensiveness metric and reveals patterns about the texts and their contexts during a pandemic and strong cultural and societal movements.

This study aims to explore the intellectual connections of mission statement research to identify the influential domains of source knowledge and emergent areas of research for future studies.

The authors deployed bibliometric methods, namely, citation, co-citation and network analysis. The authors collected data from the Scopus and Web of Science databases and analyzed the connections of the most influential articles.

The authors identified four knowledge domains that informed the mission statements literature: guidance on mission statement development, the value of mission statements, mission statements and organizational issues, mission statement content and communication. And the authors spotted four opportunities for knowledge advancement based on theoretical frameworks, performance measures, content and context.

Practitioners should think beyond the immediate benefits of mission statements, such as performance and legitimacy improvement. Instead, they should focus on long-term benefits, information advantages and democratizing the development phase of mission statements.

Mission statements have attracted scholarly attention over the past 40 years. Despite the formation of a considerable body of knowledge, intellectual connections of mission statement research have been largely neglected. Previous studies had a narrow focus or insufficient coverage of the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first full-scale bibliometric study on the intellectual connections of the mission statements literature.

This paper aims to expose the underlying reasons behind the failure of the mission statement to have a significant impact on performance and to recommend ways forward.

A comprehensive literature review is conducted and common themes and trends are revealed. These are then discussed under four major domains of the mission statement: definitions, functions, focus, and form. The impact of the mission statement on performance is then discussed. Examples of mission statements of some prominent organizations are provided to substantiate arguments. The paper ends with conclusions and recommendations.

The paper reveals the contradictions and confusion that beset research in this area. It demonstrates how concepts such as mission, vision, values, identity are mixed up with one another, leading to a slow progress in research and underutilization of the power of mission in practice.

The paper recommends theoretical focus and practical flexibility. Theoretically, it suggests conceptual distinction between mission, vision, values, and other related concepts. Once this is done, it suggests the use of a “guiding statement” to flexibly describe any statement that integrates more than one of the above mentioned concepts in practice. The paper offers no empirical evidence of the usefulness of its recommendations.

The paper reveals the sources of ineffectiveness of the mission statement. The recommendations may help to minimize the confusion surrounding the functions, focus, and form of the mission statement. This may also help to advance the research in this area and inform the practice in the field.

The paper critically reads the literature to uncover the contradictions and confusion besetting research in this area and makes original recommendations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the content of mission statements of India’s Super 50 companies, selected from Forbes India magazine, on multiple aspects such as components, stakeholders’ inclusion, content readability and strategic orientation.

A total sample of 29 companies was chosen for the study, whose mission statement details were available on their official websites. These firms’ mission statement was rated on the basis of nine selected components of what constitutes a “good mission statement.” Further, industry-level analysis was also carried out to measure significant differences between manufacturing and service industries. Data were analyzed using frequency analysis, average and t-statistics. Gunning Fog index was also calculated to measure content readability.

The results show that Indian firms largely focus on their customers as major stakeholders while defining their mission and emphasize upon values and philosophy, products or services offered, and integration of technology in production or processes. There is no statistically significant difference identified between the average mean value of components for sample manufacturing and service firms.

The study is cross-sectional in nature; however, a few firms redesign their mission according to need; therefore, a detailed longitudinal study of a few firms could open up new paradigms. The findings are based on sample firms selected from Forbes India, so generalization needs to be done with complete caution.

The study looks ahead of the most popular of David’s (1989) nine crucial components of mission statements, taking into account major shifts in the business environment. It also attempts to fill a contextual research gap by analyzing the mission statements of top Indian firms. Three crucial elements – “strategic decision,” “stakeholder concerns” and “critical success factors” – have been identified for Indian firms that define their mission statement.

This study examines the stock market reactions to an involuntary adjustment to loan‐loss reserves by the write‐downs of Argentinean loans by major banks with Argentinean loan exposure. This event has escaped investigation in the empirical literature of the LDC debt crisis. A seemingly unrelated regression study, rather than a Brown and Warner (1980) event study, is employed to investigate two pairs of hypotheses, namely the new‐information vs. information‐leakage hypothesis and the rational‐pricing vs. investor‐contagion hypothesis, using daily stock market data. Sample banks are grouped into three portfolios (highly exposed multinational banks, mildly exposed regional wholesale banks and unexposed or nominally exposed regional consumer banks) to test the investor‐contagion effect. The results indicate that the stock market adjusts quickly to new information, thereby providing evidence of semi‐strong‐form market efficiency. Unlike previous research, this research finds strong evidence for an investor‐contagion effect.

Analyses the career of William Zebulon Foster, a leader of the American Communist Party, and a three‐time candidate for President of the United States under that party′s banner. Foster rose from the slums of Philadelphia to earn the reputation of an accomplished labour organizer and then to embrace communist ideology. The poverty of his immigrant parents, and the endless series of dreary jobs he was forced to enter, beginning at age ten, nurtured his rebellious spirit and cultivated an antagonism towards capitalism. Emphasizes the evolution of his ideology from socialism to syndicalism and finally Marxism‐Leninism. William Foster found his vocation as an organizer of trade unions on behalf of the Communist movement. He was a prolific propagandist for and historian of the Party. Never deterred by tortuous twists and turns of the party line, he followed it faithfully and inflexibly until his death in Moscow in 1961.

A mission statement is an important tool for organizational communication, as it speaks to all stakeholders. It should be readable and comprehensible. The main objective of this article is to determine the readability of mission statements from selected Islamic banks.

This study was conducted using simple counting techniques (total words, total sentences and number of words per sentence) and readability analyses. The mission statements from 169 Islamic banks were taken from their respective web sites between March and April 2012.

The findings reveal that the mission statements of Islamic banks are difficult to read and comprehend and require 17 years of formal education before they can be fully understood.

Future studies should consider a comparative analysis that looks at how the origins of a bank can affect mission statements as well as examining different division of the financial sector such as insurance companies and other financial institutions.

The findings of this study revealed that banks have a great deal of work to do on their mission statements in order to make them readable and understandable to a wide range of stakeholders.

This article is first of its kind as it focuses on an area that has not been investigated by earlier researchers.

Mission statements are fairly ubiquitous, particularly among large organizations. However, if they are to have a chance of achieving the desired positive outcomes, they must first be readable and comprehensible to the targeted stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this issue, to answer the question of whether the mission statements of large companies are readable or not.

Content analysis and appropriate scores were employed to investigate the readability of the mission statements collected from a random sample of 100 firms in the Fortune 500 annual rankings.

The results indicate that on average, the mission statements of the studied companies are not that readable, and that in the case of many of them, the mission statements assume the readings skills of a university graduate.

The results of this paper suggest that if the target audience of a mission statement is broad, and includes stakeholders such as customers and lower level employees, then firms would do well to test the readability of their mission statements, and revise them where necessary. Mission statements are not the only tools that organizations use to communicate with stakeholder. This encourages future research on readability analysis of other communication tools in firms. A larger sample of companies and other approaches to measure readability can be included in future research.

This paper adds to the related literature, as the level of readability of mission statements has received limited attention in the past.