Text mining the mission statements of the most ethical companies
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/DTA-10-2021-0280 |
| Published date | 15 February 2022 |
| Date | 15 February 2022 |
| Pages | 671-685 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Information behaviour & retrieval,Metadata,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Tuncay Bayrak |
Text mining the mission
statements of the most
ethical companies
Tuncay Bayrak
Western New England University, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA
Abstract
Purpose –This paper explores and examines the mission statements of the most ethical companies across the
globe in terms of their main purposes, values, goals, and objective, and what they say about their vision
and goals.
Design/methodology/approach–This study is based on the data published by the Ethisphere Institute, the
global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices. Having compiled the
mission statements into a text file, the authors conducted text mining using a commercially available text
mining tool SAS Enterprise Miner to survey if the most ethical companies have valued the same vision and
mission such as social responsibility and ethics.
Findings–A review of their mission statements indicated that some of the most ethical companies surveyed in
this study such as 3M and Voya strive to be “socially responsible and ethical,”support their “societies”and
respect and protect the “nature,”“planet”and “environment.”The world’s most ethical companies that stress
these weighted terms in their mission statements may do so to show their commitment by being socially
responsible and ethical, and delivering sustainable business solutions to their customers.
Originality/value –This study provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of mission statements
of the most ethical companies in an attempt to identify patterns of differences and similarities within these
statements.
Keywords Text mining, Most ethical companies, Mission statement analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
A mission statement defines and communicates an organization’s core values and focus, what
the organization does for its customers and employees and outlines the scope of its
operations. Through a mission statement, an organization describes its direction and primary
objectives and expresses why it exists. Mission statements are the organization’s central
defining purpose and focus (Fitzgerald and Cunningham, 2016) and are deemed effective
tools for communicating the goals of organizations (Desmidt, 2016). They furthermore
incorporate basic contents of organizational culture (Babnik et al., 2014), and organizations
project their philosophy through their mission statements (Swales and Rogers, 1995).
While their characteristics such as their length, format and language may vary, and
various factors may play an important role in crafting and writing effective mission
statements, they, nevertheless, are expected to have some common themes and key terms
across various organizations. Although mission statements contain what is called
unstructured textual data, valuable information such as common themes and key terms
contained in mission statements may be extracted, quantified and transformed through text
mining into information and insights for analysis. In addition, since mission statements
communicate an organization’s fundamental values, philosophy and objectives, analyzing
them may allow one to understand the relationship between organizational performance and
a mission statement of a particular organization and how organizations employ mission
statements as a tool for strategy implementation.
This paper explores and examines the mission statements of the most ethical companies
across the globe in terms of their main purposes, values, goals and objective, and what they
say about their vision and goals. We conducted text mining using a commercially available
Text mining
the mission
statements
671
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https://www.emerald.com/insight/2514-9288.htm
Received 15 October 2021
Revised 12 January 2022
Accepted 29 January 2022
Data Technologies and
Applications
Vol. 56 No. 5, 2022
pp. 671-685
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2514-9288
DOI 10.1108/DTA-10-2021-0280
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