Institutional mission statements: discursive construction of organizational identity in Canadian post-secondary education

Sebin Jung

doi:10.24933/horizontes.v38i1.907

Abstract

Para navegar nas páginas de instituições educacionais quando escolhendo onde estudar, futuros alunos precisam ter altos níveis de letramento para entender como tais organizações se representam para o mundo. Este estudo examina a construção discursiva da identidade organizacional nas declarações de missão de instituições Canadenses pós-secundária selecionadas por meio da aplicação do procedimento de análise de gêneros (SWALES, 1990) o Inglês para Fins Específicos de movimentos e passos e análise léxico-gramatical (HYON, 2018) para entender a organização retórica das declarações de missão e padrões gramaticais e lexicais que caracterizam cada movimento individual. Os resultados das análises de um pequeno corpus de 14 declarações de missões mostram que todas as amostras de declaração de missão incluem ‘comprometimentos’ como o movimento obrigatório; entretanto, os comprometimentos primários das declarações de missão da universidade diferenciam-se daqueles de faculdades, portanto refletindo diferenças em propósitos institucionais e funções de dois tipos de instituições educacionais pós-secundária. Implicações práticas e pedagógicas do estudo são discutidos.

Highlights

As this study examines how organizational identity is projected in college and university mission statements and how to apply this method in a classroom, it adopts the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach to genre analysis as its theoretical and analytical framework
Drawing on previous studies which suggest the differences in mission statements used by different types of educational institutions, this study investigates the construction of college and university mission statements as well as their representation of organizational identity
The study has investigated the discursive construction of the organizational identity in a small corpus of 14 mission statements collected from the public websites of two types of Canadian post-secondary institutions, colleges and universities, by analyzing their rhetorical move-step structure and lexico-grammatical features

Summary

Introduction

Genre analysis may serve a tool that fosters such literacy. Institutional websites contain multiple texts, which are aimed at prospective students and other audiences. One of such texts that almost always is included in a post-secondary institutions’ websites is mission statement. Mission statement is a document that provides information about an organization: what it is and what it does (FALSEY, 1989). Since mission statements have been widely adopted as a strategic management and communication tool by different organizations Organizational identity, defined as a sum of central, enduring, distinctive features of an organization (ALBERT; WHETTEN, 1985), has been an important focus of research in the business world as it has been viewed as a core component of an organization’s mission (GIOIA; PATVARDHAN; HAMILTON; CORLEY, 2013)

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion