A Genre-based Analysis Of Mission Statements Of Chinese And American Commercial Banks

As a recent developing field in discourse analysis, genre analysis has become a hottopic in the field of applied linguistics. Genre analysis mainly studies the communicativepurposes and strategies in discourse and it has evolved from the surface-level descriptionof language to deep-level explanation and has concerned itself most with describing thehigher-level organization and structures of the texts.This thesis investigates the mission statements of Chinese and American commercialbanks in a genre-based approach. Despite the increasing interest in the study and analysisof corporate mission statements, studies from the perspective of genre analysis are rarelyconducted. Therefore, the research is of great importance in the academic field.The proposed approach is adopted in a descriptive and explanatory way of studying60authentic mission statements of Chinese and American commercial banks (30Chinese,30American) downloaded from the corporate official websites. The format, content andcommunicative purposes of mission statements of Chinese and American commercialbanks are analyzed. After analyzing the different moves adopted in mission statements inthe collected data, the author comes up with the generic structures of mission statementsof Chinese and American commercial banks. It is found that there are some similar anddifferent moves in mission statements of Chinese and American commercial banks. Thesimilar moves in mission statements of Chinese and American commercial banks are AStatement of Mission, A Statement of Vision, A Statement of Philosophy and Concern forStakeholders. Besides these shared moves, the mission statements of Americancommercial banks have the move of A General Description of the Corporation whilemission statements of Chinese commercial banks are likely to stress the move ofPrinciples for Employees’ Behavioral Standard. These differences reflect the differentcultural background between China and America. The author tries to explore the reasonsbehind the different discourse structure according to Hofstede’s Culture DimensionTheory. Finally, some suggestions for the Chinese professionals for drafting missionstatements successfully and for students learning to write mission statements in ESPcourse are proposed. For example, there should contain some information about thegeneral description of the corporation, pay more attention to the employees’ right andshow more concern for the employees.