Stakeholder Orientation in Cruise Lines’ Mission Statements

Lara Penco,Giorgia Profumo,Roberta Scarsi

doi:10.3390/su9112151

Abstract

Consistent with the extant management literature, mission statements are crucial for the sustainability and growth of any firms and have been considered to be a tool for the strategic management process. Despite the considerable attention awarded to this theme, the role of the mission statement in the strategic management of tourism firms has not been sufficiently highlighted. The present paper tries to bridge this literature gap and aims to (i) analyze the content of mission statements; and (ii) investigate the stakeholder orientation of cruise line mission statements. We apply a content analysis method to analyze the mission statements of 44 cruise lines, employing three different perspectives: (1) the inclusion of stakeholder groups; (2) mentions of specific “mission” components; (3) reference to four goals usually assigned to mission statements. The analysis was performed using the software package QDA-Miner. The results suggest that it is possible to identify four clusters of firms that present similar content in their mission statements, and that cruise companies tend to reserve a major attention to customers. This contribution presents some valuable research implications mainly useful for researchers and academics, but also maybe of benefit to professionals and investors.

Highlights

The cruise industry has been considered as one of the fastest growing segments of the global travel and leisure business since the late 1980s [1,2,3], reaching over 24 million passengers worldwide in 2016.Despite this dramatic expansion in the last three decades, the cruise industry has only recently attracted increasing interest from academics and practitioners [4]
Most managerial and economic contributions dealing with the cruise industry refer to the tourism and service management perspectives or to the maritime economic approach and are focused on several research domains, such as the evolution of the supply/demand of the industry [2], the economic impact on cruise port destinations [5,6,7,8,9] or cruiser behavior [10,11]
Few academic contributions have addressed the topics of strategic management and business administration of cruise companies [12], despite the increasing competition in the industry which has stressed the relevance of this research domains

Summary

Introduction

The cruise industry has been considered as one of the fastest growing segments of the global travel and leisure business since the late 1980s [1,2,3], reaching over 24 million passengers worldwide in 2016. Despite this dramatic expansion in the last three decades, the cruise industry has only recently attracted increasing interest from academics and practitioners [4]. Few academic contributions have addressed the topics of strategic management (strategy formulation, implementation and evaluation) and business administration (managerial accounting, human resource planning and development, supply chain management and outsourcing) of cruise companies [12], despite the increasing competition in the industry which has stressed the relevance of this research domains.

Objectives

Methods

Results