A Comparative Genre Analysis Of Mission Statements Of Chinese And American Cross-border E-commerce Enterprises

With the rapid development of e-commerce,more and more enterprises choose the convenient and efficient cross-border e-commerce platform to cooperate with each other.Although Chinese cross-border e-commerce witnesses explosive development,there still exist lots of deficiencies compared with the developed countries,of which the mission statement is one example.Although great attention has been paid to the research of mission statements,most of the studies have been conducted from the perspective of economics and management instead of the discourse analysis.Thus,this thesis will make a genre analysis of the mission statements of Chinese and American cross-border e-commerce from the perspective of applied linguistics.The author thus collects 30 mission statements from Chinese and American cross-border e-commerce websites respectively.Based on the Fred R.David's nine elements of the evaluation of mission statements,Swales' and Bhatia's genre theory and Hofstede's cultural dimension theory,the author makes a comparative analysis of the format,content and move structures of the mission statements of Chinese and American cross-border e-commerce enterprises and attempts to explore the cultural reasons behind these differences.This thesis finds that great differences are manifested between the English mission statements of Chinese and American cross-border e-commerce enterprises in the format adoption,content involving and move structure choosing.By analyzing the move structures of the samples of the two countries' mission statements and the frequency of each move of all the data collected,the author summarizes the similar and different moves and steps.For example,the analysis reveals the similar moves including: Stating the company mission,Stating the company vision,Stating the company philosophy and Concerning for stakeholders.Different from Chinese mission statements,the American ones also include the move of Introducing the company,and pay more concerns to the employee and society.Finally,the author provides some suggestions on the drafting of mission statements with higher quality that would be more suitable for the reading habits of foreign audiences for Chinese cross-border e-commerce enterprises,such as briefly introducing the enterprise and concerning more about the employees and society to show more humanistic care.Meanwhile,the author hopes this thesis could provide some inspiration on the ESP teaching.