A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Corporate Mission Statements Between Chinese And American Internet Firms

Currently,the scientific and technological revolution based on the Internet is changing the way people work and live.Although the Chinese Internet firms show explosive development,there are still many deficiencies compared with the American ones,of which the mission statement is one example.Additionally,despite much attention has been paid to corporate mission statements,most of scholars conduct their researches from the perspective of management and economics instead of genre analysis.Therefore,the present study will be great importance to the genre study.This thesis collects 30 mission statements from Chinese and American Internet Firms' websites respectively.The study aims to make a contrastive analysis of the format,content and generic structure of the mission statements of Chinese and American Internet Firms and attempts to explore the possible reasons behind these differences by adopting Fred R.David's nine elements of evaluating the mission statements theory,Van Dijk's macro-structure theory,Hasan's Generic Structure Potential Model theory and Intercultural dimension theories.The research results indicate that both Chinese and American Internet Firms share some similarities as well as great differences in their English mission statements.Firstly,enterprises of both countries put more emphasis on customers,products or service,markets and etc.Secondly,the generic structures of mission statements of two countries contain two structures,namely,macro-structure and micro-structure.Thirdly,Chinese Firms tend to choose some key words or phrases to express core value of mission statements while American ones are likely to employ paragraphs in their mission statements.Fourthly,Chinese Enterprises would like to put more emphasis on the philosophy while American ones on employees.Fifthly,there are more obligatory elements appeared in American Enterprises' generic structure model while less in Chinese ones.Finally,some suggestions are recommended to improve the quality of Chinese Internet Firms' mission statements on their future mission statement drafting,such as,adopting different formats to state the mission,enriching the contents to show more aspects of the enterprises,highlighting the key points to present the uniqueness and planning the structures of mission statements to make better sense.