The content analysis of mission and vision statements of Turkish and European big firms: a comparisons

Abstract

The main object of this paper, is to analyse and compare the mission and vision statements of Turkish top 100 firms and European top 100 firms, using a combination of international scales. We reached Turkish top 100 firms from the related list of Istanbul Chamber of Industry (ISO), and European top 100 firms from Fortune Global 500 list. In the evaluation process we identified 50 mission statements each from both gruops and reached results based on that data. In the research we focused on the questions of, in what extent do the mission and vision statements of big firms consistent to the criteria which the management literature set, and what the differences are between the Turkish and European practices. In the study we also focused on the cultural, economic, and other regional reasons of the differences. The methodology which we used was a combination of the scales from the international literature on this subject. From this point of view, first of all, we searched whether big firms have mission and vision statements on their web sites. We also searched about the number of shareholders, the number of components, characteristics of components, objectives and mostly repeated statements.