ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by discussing some of the many criticisms made against organisational mission statements, including arguments that they are ineffective and unrepresentative of organisational reality. Contained within such criticisms is often the charge that they are ‘mere rhetoric’, a criticism which the chapter goes on to argue adopts too narrow a focus of what rhetoric is. In discussing the criticisms that have been levelled against mission statements, it is argued that implied in both the many criticisms and definitions of mission statements is a view that they are in some way concerned with organisational identity. This concern with organisational identity, it is argued here, means that mission statements are inherently rhetorical, not in the sense of manipulation, obfuscation or bombast, but in the Aristotelian and Burkean sense of rhetoric’s concern with, respectively, persuasion and the generation of identification. The argument of the chapter is, therefore, that if an objective of mission statements is the generation or continuation of an organisational identity, it is dependent on rhetoric in attempting to do this. In that rhetorical sense, the mission statement may therefore be seen as performing organisational identity.
