Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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Introduction
Enterprise culture as Projected in Mission Statements of Educational Institutions: A Functional Perspective
Hala T. S. Maklad
Enterprise culture as Projected in Mission
Statements of Educational Institutions: A
Functional Perspective
Hala T. S. Maklad
Sadat Academy for Management Sciences
The study aims at revealing the components of enterprise culture as
reflected in mission statements, drawing upon systemic functional grammar
(Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Keat (1990: 4) defines
enterprise culture as (a) the reconstruction of a wide range of institutions
along business lines; and (b) the conduct of the individual, who should
develop and exhibit ‘enterprising’ qualities, such as personal responsibility,
independence, resourcefulness and self-discipline. Since a mission
statement is primarily a reporting genre influenced by the colonization of
the promotional genre (Bhatia, 2004: 84), and “decidedly persuasive”
(Williams, 2008: 100), it is assumed that the departure point for identifying
enterprise culture components is the analysis of mission statements within
the Ethos Model suggested by (Isaksson and Jørgensen, 2010) and built on
Aristotle’s ethos concepts (Aristotle, 1932 cited in Williams, 2008:101).
Method
Twenty four Mission statements are collected from websites of Egyptian
private and public universities, 12 from each. Each text is analyzed into
clauses, finite and non finite, and each clause into its main constituents (a)
Process Type, mainly Material and Relational; and (b) Participants: Actor
and Goal/Beneficiary/Client. According to Process Types and Participants,
each clause is coded as representing:
(a) Appeals for communicating ethos of Expertise, Trustworthiness,
and Empathy expressed respectively by the rhetorical strategies of
Self Promotion, Self Characterization, and Self-Sacrifice (Isaksson
and Jørgensen, 2010: 230-1);
(b) Enterprise culture components: (i) Commercial Enterprise, i.e. the
tendency to run the educational institutions as a commercial
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