W. Kyle Ingle, Terra Greenwell and Justin Woods
We sought to identify codes and themes in the mission statements of Kentucky's school districts and examine the relationship between district characteristics and the mission…
Abstract
Purpose
We sought to identify codes and themes in the mission statements of Kentucky's school districts and examine the relationship between district characteristics and the mission statements.
Design/methodology/approach
We undertook a mixed methods design, specifically, a sequential transformative strategy with a theoretical lens overlaying the sequential procedures and guiding the analysis.
Findings
Analysis revealed a range of 1–7 codes per mission statement and a mean of 3.05. Generic student success and individual attention represented the most frequently occurring codes in the mission statements. Chi-square tests of bivariate association yielded no significant differences between districts by locale. Logistic regression analysis revealed that the percentage of students in the district scoring proficient or distinguished in both reading and mathematics was associated significantly (p < 0.05) with the theme of student support.
Research limitations
Although we cannot establish causation between mission statements content and student outcomes or vice-versa, district mission statement remain a visible and public expression of why an organization exists that should guide actions and decision-making, whether instructional, financial or otherwise.
Practical implications
Our study revealed shared institutional language within mission statements across Kentucky's school district, largely without regard to local context. Our analysis suggests that federal and state policy makers are influencing mission statements more so than those at the local level.
Originality/value
Our analysis provides further evidence that suggests that federal and state policy makers are influencing mission statements more so than those at the local level.
Details
Keywords
Minqi Liu, Kieran Taylor-Neu, Gregory D. Saxton, Dean Neu, Abu S. Rahaman and Jeff Everett
The study aims to explore how Indigenous peoples and their concerns become “entextualized” within the environmental disclosures of resource extraction firms.
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to explore how Indigenous peoples and their concerns become “entextualized” within the environmental disclosures of resource extraction firms.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed-methods content analysis of 11,850 annual information forms filed by resource extraction firms with Canadian security regulators between 1997 and 2023 is conducted. FinBERT transformer encodings, agglomerative hierarchical clustering and computer-assisted techniques are combined with inductive analyses.
Findings
The findings show that, although Indigenous peoples and their concerns have become a more important element in environmental disclosures, dominant semantic meanings tend to view Indigenous people as impediments. At the same time, the entextualizations of Indigenous peoples and their concerns sometimes escape these dominant frames. Big firms appear to be no more likely to exhibit leadership or substantively take Indigenous peoples and their concerns into account than smaller firms.
Originality/value
The study offers a longitudinal perspective on how the environment and Indigenous peoples are portrayed in corporate disclosures. The study emphasizes the need to view environmental accountability as inextricably intertwined with accountability to Indigenous peoples and also illustrates the importance of identifying the semantic meanings that are being communicated. We propose that analyzing how and why specific semantic meanings about Indigenous peoples and their concerns become entextualized provides activists and policy-makers with a starting point for improved disclosure practices and, hopefully, better resource extraction practices.