Comparative Analysis of Mission Statements of Chinese and American Fortune 500 Companies: A Study from the Perspective of Linguistics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear author/s,

the paper is interesting but I would strongly suggest a logical organization of it. I suggest the following:

- introduction (presenting the context in which the study takes place, the objective of the paper, what previous studies stated about the topic and the research gap)

literature review (where you should present main studies about the topic, here you need to strongly update relevant literature! use relevant literature from top journals, some examples below) research question (if emerges a lack of previous studies, this represents the gap the paper would to fill in and/or the questions that the authors would answer through the case study) methodology (try to support your choices, e.g. Fortune Global with prior studies that made similar research. I can suggest some of them, see below) analysis (presents the results of the analysis and of the paper, at the moment this part is quite well written) discussion (compare the results with previous studies, suggest managerial implications, limitations and future line of research).

References

Kantabutra, S., & Avery, G. C. (2010). The power of vision: statements that resonate. Journal of business strategy, 31(1), 37-45.

Lynch, N. C., Lynch, M. F., & Casten, D. B. (2014). The expanding use of sustainability reporting. The CPA journal, 84(3), 18.

Biloslavo, R., & Lynn, M. (2007). Mission statements in Slovene enterprises: Institutional pressures and contextual adaptation. Management decision, 45(4), 773-788.

Ferraris, A., Bresciani, S., & Del Giudice, M. (2016). International diversification and firm performance: a four-stage model. EuroMed Journal of Business, 11(3), 362-375.

Atrill, P., Omran, M., & Pointon, J. (2005). Company mission statements and financial performance. Corporate Ownership and Control, 2(3), 28-35.

Bresciani, S., & Ferraris, A. (2015). International diversification and performance in European service multinational companies. The Marketing Review, 15(4), 423-437.

Author Response

Responses to Reviewer #1:

1、Introduction (presenting the context in which the study takes place, the objective of the paper, what previous studies stated about the topic and the research gap).

We present the context from the perspective of institutional theory, believing that mission statements can be seen as products of economic and institutional environment. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory was used to supplement the informal institutional context between Chinese and American companies. Previous studies stated about the attributes of mission statement and its trendency in current China by both Chinese and foreign scholars were added to illustrate the research gap and research necessity.

Following is the detailed description:

“Mission statements reflect the values of the environment that they are constructed, of which many differences may be explained by economic and institutional environment and industry structure (Biloslavo and Lynn, 2007). In the time of globalization, while enterprises regularly operate across country borders and sell globally, such global and cross-cultural environment no doubt would significantly impact the formulation of the missions of enterprises. Enterprises, based on the cultures and the social-economic context in which they were established and grew, would very naturally have such cultural and social-economic characteristics reflected in their missions. Our study will focus on the missions of enterprises in a fast-growing economy: China, whose astonishing growth over more than three decades has made the country and its enterprises the focus of the world. In the examination of mission statements of Chinese enterprises, there can be two interesting and useful angles: the first is from the distinction of the Chinese culture in the spectrum of world cultures, especially the comparison based on the difference between Chinese culture and the cultures of leading industrial countries; the second is the cultural change China is experiencing when the country is playing “catch-up” with the industrial countries in modernization of economy and society.

From perspective one, when viewing social cultural environment for enterprises based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory (Hofstede, et al. 2005), there are consensus that the Chinese culture is distinct in its greater power distance compared to many western industrial countries such as (especially) the US. Another consensus is that the Chinese culture puts more emphasis on collectivism while the American culture advocates individualism. Such significant differences between Chinese and American societies will no doubt cast unique characteristics in the mission statements for the enterprises in the two countries.”

References:

Biloslavo, R., & Lynn, M. (2007). Mission statements in Slovene enterprises: Institutional pressures and contextual adaptation. Management decision, 45(4), 773-788. Hofstede, G.; Hofstede, G.J.; Minkov, M. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (Vol. 2). New York: Mcgraw-hill. 2005.

2、literature review (where you should present main studies about the topic, here you need to strongly update relevant literature! use relevant literature from top journals, some examples below)

In addition to what we update in the Introduction, we also adapted the description of mission statement and appraisal system as follows:

“Mission statement is one type of applications of language; it conveys value, opinion and attitude of a company to recipients of the message. Communicating the vision of a company was deemed one of the important factors to affect the realization of the vision (Kantabutra and Avery, 2010). Therefore, the language that is used in corporate mission statement should be further explored from the perspective as instrument of communication. Linguistically, the language sources for the author’s opinions, attitudes, and stance was referred to as appraisal system, which was put forth by J.R. Martin (1992) in his book English Text: System and Structure. It is particularly helpful to study mission statements from the perspective of linguistics, for the very purpose to explore the organization's own positioning and its attitude toward stakeholders, as well as the effectiveness of conveying interpersonal meaning of the mission statement. So far, there is yet to find researches along the line of linguistic approach. Hence comes our study as the starting point in the perspective of linguistics to reach fresh and deeper understanding of mission statements.”

Reference:

Kantabutra, S., and Avery, G. C., 2010. The Power of Vision: Statements that Resonate. Journal of Business Strategy, 31(1): 37-45. Martin, J. R., English Text: System and Structure. Loan/open Shelves, 1992.

Research question (if emerges a lack of previous studies, this represents the gap the paper would to fill in and/or the questions that the authors would answer through the case study)

It was put forward the research gap and the objectives of our paper in part 2(Research Goals and Methodology) :

“There have been fairly comprehensive researches on mission statements. The studies on the quality of mission statements, however, have been from a relatively narrow perspective with limitations in methodology and samples. Specifically, the commonly used method - content analysis - was conducted directly on original words of the mission statements, without a filtering process to “distill” meaningful words that express the central value and top priority that the enterprise intends to communicate (such as consumer priority, or market orientation). Previous studies on corporate culture or core values including mission statements are more qualitative discussions. Quantitative research is limited to the inner level of the organization, with less attention to the inter-organizational level and cross-cultural level (Lin and Zhang, 2014; Duh and Milfelner, 2010). The selected samples of mission statements in existing studies are confined either within a country or within an industry, which did not allow generalization and the reach to universal findings. It is, therefore, necessary to widen the sample of mission statements and optimize the analyzing methodology across industries and across countries, to reach more universal findings.”

Methodology (try to support your choices, e.g. Fortune Global with prior studies that made similar research. I can suggest some of them, see below)

Thank you for your suggestion.

“There were plenty of studies using companies in the Fortune 500 list as samples of largest companies to explore various cross-national business topics (e.g. Bresciani and Ferraris, 2015; Ferraris et al., 2016). We likewise believed it proper to use companies on the Fortune 500 list as representative samples for our study that focused on cross-country differences of mission statements. Based on the above understanding and reason, we selected, in the order of the Fortune ranking, the top 100 Chinese enterprises and top 100 American enterprises as our subjects of study.”

Analysis (presents the results of the analysis and of the paper, at the moment this part is quite well written)

Thank you for your approval.

We tried to further improve this part (PART 4: Comparative Analysis of Mission Statements of Chinese and American Companies) in the text. All points including 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 were further explained.

Discussion (compare the results with previous studies, suggest managerial implications, limitations and future line of research).

Thank you. Actually, we have compared the analysis results, in part 4, with previous studies respectively in the five sub-analyses from different perspectives.

In part 5(Conclusions) we added “Consistent with previous studies (Qu, 2007; Jin, 2002), mission statements of Chinese companies are society-oriented and emphasize the social roles of an organization, showing a lessor extend of corporate pertinence; while American companies’ pay more attention to customers and partner relationship, which can be seen as the American companies’ market and individual orientation.”

References:

(1) Ferraris, A., Bresciani, S., & Del Giudice, M. (2016). International diversification and firm performance: a four-stage model. EuroMed Journal of Business, 11(3), 362-375. 

(2) Bresciani, S., & Ferraris, A. (2015). International diversification and performance in European service multinational companies. The Marketing Review, 15(4), 423-437.

 (1) Qu Qing, 2007. A Comparison Between the Cultural Statements of Chinese and United States Companies. China Industrial Economy, (5): 80-87.

(2) Jin Siyu, 2002. Basic Judgment and Countermeasures on the Status Quo of Chinese Enterprise Culture Construction[J]. Management World, (7):147-148.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is very interesting. These are My few suggestions:

1) documental analysis needs a detailed normative background in order to describe the legal differences between the two context;

2) the discussions could be extend through more critical comments (on this point there are several accounting studies)

3)paid more attention to the description or the implications connected to your wor

Author Response

Thank you very much for your constructive suggestions.

Responses to Reviewer #2: 

1) Documental analysis needs a detailed normative background in order to describe the legal differences between the two context;

We believed that mission statements can be the organization’s response to the economic and institutional environment. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory was employed to supplement the informal institutional context between Chinese and American companies. Both economic and cultural environments (as informal institution) can describe the legal differences between the two contexts.

Following is the detailed description:

“Mission statements reflect the values of the environment that they are constructed, of which many differences may be explained by economic and institutional environment and industry structure (Biloslavo and Lynn, 2007). In the time of globalization, while enterprises regularly operate across country borders and sell globally, such global and cross-cultural environment no doubt would significantly impact the formulation of the missions of enterprises. Enterprises, based on the cultures and the social-economic context in which they were established and grew, would very naturally have such cultural and social-economic characteristics reflected in their missions. Our study will focus on the missions of enterprises in a fast-growing economy: China, whose astonishing growth over more than three decades has made the country and its enterprises the focus of the world. In the examination of mission statements of Chinese enterprises, there can be two interesting and useful angles: the first is from the distinction of the Chinese culture in the spectrum of world cultures, especially the comparison based on the difference between Chinese culture and the cultures of leading industrial countries; the second is the cultural change China is experiencing when the country is playing “catch-up” with the industrial countries in modernization of economy and society.

From perspective one, when viewing social cultural environment for enterprises based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory (Hofstede, et al. 2005), there are consensus that the Chinese culture is distinct in its greater power distance compared to many western industrial countries such as (especially) the US. Another consensus is that the Chinese culture puts more emphasis on collectivism while the American culture advocates individualism. Such significant differences between Chinese and American societies will no doubt cast unique characteristics in the mission statements for the enterprises in the two countries.”

References:

(1) Biloslavo, R., & Lynn, M. (2007). Mission statements in Slovene enterprises: Institutional pressures and contextual adaptation. Management decision, 45(4), 773-788.

(2) Qu Qing, 2007. A Comparison Between the Cultural Statements of Chinese and United States Companies. China Industrial Economy, (5): 80-87.

2) the discussions could be extend through more critical comments (on this point there are several accounting studies)

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. We have conducted extensive work to improve our discussions and made more critical comments on numerous places, the most prominent among which are the following five places:

In the section “1 Chinese and American companies show similar pattern in resources distribution”

We added/rewrote:

“It is worth notice that on the dimension of “Judgment”, the Chinese companies had a substantially higher percentage of words in this category as compared to the American companies: 31.61% vs 22.51%. This phenomenon may be interpreted from the different cultural backgrounds of the Chinese and the American companies: While the US is a more individualistic society with tolerance being one of its hallmark characteristics, and thus much less judgmental toward entities (individuals and organizations), China is a society with higher level of collectivism which exerts higher pressure or requirements for conformance (Hofstede et al., 2005), thus entities (individuals and organizations) tend to be more judgmental and be more judged by other entities. Hence the difference between Chinese and American companies in their use of judgment words in their mission statements.

Therefore, although the cultural and economic background of Chinese and American enterprises are different, the social functions of the corporate mission statement are similar than they are different. Therefore, the Chinese and American enterprises show similar pattern in resources distribution among the three subsystems - affect, judgement, and appreciation. Yet, in the overall similarity, there is still visible cultural difference as manifested in the dimension of Judgment. The more judgmental tendency of the Chinese companies might be a logical reflection of the overall social and cultural context in Chinese companies where the pursuit and maintenance of norms are more highly valued.”

In the section “2 Similar trend in the frequency change of attitude evaluation words among Chinese and American companies”

We added/rewrote:

“This phenomenon may be examined from the fact that the American companies have been more mature in their strategic management, that they more fully understand and therefore emphasize the importance of mission statement’s guiding roles and impacts to their company, that their mission statements are the product of deep, thorough, long-term “distillation” of their own business values and strategic pursuit, from their own business practices. While for the Chinese companies as a “late comer” in strategic management and in the use of mission statement as a strategic management tool and mechanism, the Chinese companies are still learning, often from outside and not so much from inside – values, true believes, success and failure in business models and business practices (as compared to the American companies), the high-frequency words in their mission statements are more a product of “textbook learning” or “adopting from model cases” than “home-grown” characteristics, resulted in the higher level of resemblance of top key words in the Chinese companies and less variety and characters in words other than the top-frequency words used by the Chinese companies.”

iii.

In the same section as in ii (“4.2 Similar trend in the frequency change of attitude evaluation words among Chinese and American companies”),

We added/rewrote:

“The two high-frequency words of “country” and “society” are in line with this emphasis for Chinese enterprises, because of not only the government-compliant, government-responsive characteristic of Chinese companies, but also a mindset of long-term government-guided, ideologically-charged organizational culture in China. They could reflect another subtle but understandable difference between Chinese and American companies: the American companies have been putting in action their social responsibilities and business values of social contribution through service to their communities, and therefore the word “community” is a natural reflection of what they believe and what they have been doing for yeas or even decades, while the Chinese companies are just “newly arriving” in the arena of more spontaneous involvement with the society driven by company interest and company values, that there is still clear impact of “response to government calls” in the form of such big words as “country” and “society”. To speak in an over-simplified way, the mission key words of “community” and “help” in American companies are the result of the American companies “doing” their social interaction work, and the mission key words of “country” and “society” in Chinese companies are the reflection of the Chinese companies “thinking” of their social interaction work.”

iv.

In the section “4.4 Both Chinese and American companies put emphasis on survival, corporate philosophy and public image, but there are significant differences in terms of customer, product or service, and market”,

We added/rewrote:

“The American companies on the list, on the other hand, were almost all owned by private citizens (or collection of private citizens) and operated in a mature free-market economy, which endowed them with better knowledge about the essential factors of a free market, with customer being at the center and as the ultimate end of all efforts, products and services being the vehicles to deliver functions and values to customers and to satisfy the needs of customers, and market being the overarching mechanism to encompass the above. The command and practice of the above concepts and factors directly contribute to the success of the American enterprises.”

v.

In the section “4.5 American companies pay more attention to stakeholders in primary social stakeholders (PSS) while Chinese companies highlight secondary social stakeholders (SSS)”,

We added/rewrote:

“From table 4, Chinese companies have 8 words that refer to stakeholders, accounting for 13.60% of the total frequency of top-100 words in mission statements; American companies have 11 words and a percentage of 16.91 correspondingly, suggesting more concerns on stakeholders than Chinese companies in general. It can also reflect that the American companies better identified their stakeholders than the Chinese companies, who are still in the relatively early stage of breaking away from government dominance and identifying and serving stakeholders other than the government and its delegating entities.

…

With the mentioning of “talents” added to the category of “employees” for the Chinese companies, we can see that the Chinese companies place substantially more emphasis on their employees.

…

In the context for the Chinese companies, “community” most of the time points to the relationship with local government and its branch institutions. Due to the nature of a government-dominated society, there would not be community if it were not for the local government. So it is naturally that the Chinese companies only see government rather than “community”. In contrast,  in industrial countries (with US as being representative), social movements claimed by activist groups and the legislation and judiciary practice force and encourage enterprises to take part in corporate social change activities (Hond and Bakker, 2007) which refer to initiatives to improve social good and well-being of communities in local and global levels (Bies et al., 2007). The Chinese enterprises did not have such external compliance mandatory as in the US, and therefore would be less motivated in the related aspects.”

3) paid more attention to the description or the implications connected to your work

Most of responses to this comment are incorporated in the last point “the discussions could be extend through more critical comments”. We also added the following in the “6.1 Implications for Chinese Companies” section:

“As discussed in section 4.4, the factors of “customer”, “products and services”, and “market” are critical, individually and concerted, to the survival and success of a company in a free-market economy. For the Chinese companies to excel in the gradually established market economy in China, they must pay utmost attention to these three factors, and act accordingly.”

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a fairly interesting paper providing a comparative linguistic analysis of mission statements from Chinese and American Fortune 500 companies.

My main concern with this paper is that it does not fit into this journal - there is only one brief mention of sustainability on the final page, and no clear indication that the topic is related to sustainability.

This piece would be beter suited to a general management or strategy journal. Even then, it will need work, particularly around the theoretical framework (it's not very clear why stakeholder theory is selected) and the methodology (this is something of a 'black box' in terms of process, i.e. requires much more detail of what was actually done).

Language will also require work - the piece is generally clear but requires extensive proofreading and editing to reach a publishable standard.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments. We will look into the manuscript based on your suggestions. Thank you!

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors,

The present paper performs a comparative analysis of mission statements mission statements of 100 companies each from Chinese and American companies. It is a research that can be published in the journal Sustainability. This form of the paper is difficult to read. It needs to be restructured.

The Abstract does not contain (2) Methods: Describe briefly the main methods or treatments applied; and (4) Conclusions: Indicate the main conclusions or interpretations. the text, reference numbers should be placed in square brackets [ ] RESEARCH GOALS AND METHODOLOGY must be restructured and systematized. The figures must display the axes (%) and attributes. Section 4 should contain only the comparative analysis of mission, and the next section entitled “Summary and discussion” should discuss the results. Section 4 should deepen the analysis. The results are not underlined and highlighted. Section 6 should be restructured and included in the "Conclusions and future research" section (Section 5) For the references section, you should use the Abbreviated Journal Name. Check the required format.

Best regards,

Reviewer.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your constructive suggestions.

Our Responses to Your Comments/Concerns/Suggestions:

- "The Abstract does not contain (2) Methods: Describe briefly the main methods or treatments applied; and (4) Conclusions: Indicate the main conclusions or interpretations."

Actually we described methods or treatments applied in the third and fourth sentences in the Abstract: “…The current study adopted the text corpus method, and built a corpus of mission statements by selecting the mission statements of 100 companies each from Chinese and American companies in the 2017 Fortune 500 companies. Through the analysis of high-frequency words obtained from the corpus based on the appraisal approach from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we attempted to identify the characteristics discerning the mission statements of Chinese and American companies…”

In response to the reviewer’s suggestion, we added the main conclusions or interpretations at the end of the Abstract:

“It is concluded that mission statements of Chinese companies are society-oriented and emphasize the social roles of an organization, showing a lessor extend of corporate pertinence; while American companies’ mission statements pay more attention to customers and partner relationship, which can be seen as the American companies’ market and individual orientation.”

- "The text, reference numbers should be placed in square brackets [ ]"

We have adjusted according to the required reference format in the body.

- "RESEARCH GOALS AND METHODOLOGY must be restructured and systematized."

We have restructured this part through the use of four subtitles following the sequence:

2.1. Research Samples：the Fortune 500 companies

2.2. Words Screening: the Method of Corpus Analysis

2.3. Quantitative Analyses: Three Integrated Aspects

2.4. Research Goals

The rearrangement of this part was to clearly illustrate the necessity to broadden the sample of mission statements and optimize the analyzing methodology across industries and across countries, to reach more universal findings.

- "The figures must display the axes (%) and attributes."

The chart in question was re-made, and the meaning of the axes of the coordinates were added.

- "Section 4 should contain only the comparative analysis of mission, and the next section entitled “Summary and discussion” should discuss the results"

Thank you for your suggestions regarding this point. It would be a good idea to present only the results, and then conduct discussions in the next section. However, since the results fall into five aspects or parts, separating results and their corresponding discussions would create significant difficulty for readers who would need to go back and forth for multiple pages to related our discussions with the part of result that they currently are reading. Therefore, we had the discussions following the results, making it much easier for the readers to related the data results and discussions.

-"Section 4 should deepen the analysis. The results are not underlined and highlighted."

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.

About the first half of this suggestion (“deepen the analysis”), we have conducted extensive work to improve our discussions and made more critical and in-depth discussions on numerous places, the most prominent among which are the following five places:

In the section “1 Chinese and American companies show similar pattern in resources distribution”

We added/rewrote:

“It is worth notice that on the dimension of “Judgment”, the Chinese companies had a substantially higher percentage of words in this category as compared to the American companies: 31.61% vs 22.51%. This phenomenon may be interpreted from the different cultural backgrounds of the Chinese and the American companies: While the US is a more individualistic society with tolerance being one of its hallmark characteristics, and thus much less judgmental toward entities (individuals and organizations), China is a society with higher level of collectivism which exerts higher pressure or requirements for conformance (Hofstede et al., 2005), thus entities (individuals and organizations) tend to be more judgmental and be more judged by other entities. Hence the difference between Chinese and American companies in their use of judgment words in their mission statements.

Therefore, although the cultural and economic background of Chinese and American enterprises are different, the social functions of the corporate mission statement are similar than they are different. Therefore, the Chinese and American enterprises show similar pattern in resources distribution among the three subsystems - affect, judgement, and appreciation. Yet, in the overall similarity, there is still visible cultural difference as manifested in the dimension of Judgment. The more judgmental tendency of the Chinese companies might be a logical reflection of the overall social and cultural context in Chinese companies where the pursuit and maintenance of norms are more highly valued.”

In the section “2 Similar trend in the frequency change of attitude evaluation words among Chinese and American companies”

We added/rewrote:

“This phenomenon may be examined from the fact that the American companies have been more mature in their strategic management, that they more fully understand and therefore emphasize the importance of mission statement’s guiding roles and impacts to their company, that their mission statements are the product of deep, thorough, long-term “distillation” of their own business values and strategic pursuit, from their own business practices. While for the Chinese companies as a “late comer” in strategic management and in the use of mission statement as a strategic management tool and mechanism, the Chinese companies are still learning, often from outside and not so much from inside – values, true believes, success and failure in business models and business practices (as compared to the American companies), the high-frequency words in their mission statements are more a product of “textbook learning” or “adopting from model cases” than “home-grown” characteristics, resulted in the higher level of resemblance of top key words in the Chinese companies and less variety and characters in words other than the top-frequency words used by the Chinese companies.”

iii.

In the same section as in ii (“4.2 Similar trend in the frequency change of attitude evaluation words among Chinese and American companies”),

We added/rewrote:

“The two high-frequency words of “country” and “society” are in line with this emphasis for Chinese enterprises, because of not only the government-compliant, government-responsive characteristic of Chinese companies, but also a mindset of long-term government-guided, ideologically-charged organizational culture in China. They could reflect another subtle but understandable difference between Chinese and American companies: the American companies have been putting in action their social responsibilities and business values of social contribution through service to their communities, and therefore the word “community” is a natural reflection of what they believe and what they have been doing for yeas or even decades, while the Chinese companies are just “newly arriving” in the arena of more spontaneous involvement with the society driven by company interest and company values, that there is still clear impact of “response to government calls” in the form of such big words as “country” and “society”. To speak in an over-simplified way, the mission key words of “community” and “help” in American companies are the result of the American companies “doing” their social interaction work, and the mission key words of “country” and “society” in Chinese companies are the reflection of the Chinese companies “thinking” of their social interaction work.”

iv.

In the section “4.4 Both Chinese and American companies put emphasis on survival, corporate philosophy and public image, but there are significant differences in terms of customer, product or service, and market”,

We added/rewrote:

“The American companies on the list, on the other hand, were almost all owned by private citizens (or collection of private citizens) and operated in a mature free-market economy, which endowed them with better knowledge about the essential factors of a free market, with customer being at the center and as the ultimate end of all efforts, products and services being the vehicles to deliver functions and values to customers and to satisfy the needs of customers, and market being the overarching mechanism to encompass the above. The command and practice of the above concepts and factors directly contribute to the success of the American enterprises.”

v.

In the section “4.5 American companies pay more attention to stakeholders in primary social stakeholders (PSS) while Chinese companies highlight secondary social stakeholders (SSS)”,

We added/rewrote:

“From table 4, Chinese companies have 8 words that refer to stakeholders, accounting for 13.60% of the total frequency of top-100 words in mission statements; American companies have 11 words and a percentage of 16.91 correspondingly, suggesting more concerns on stakeholders than Chinese companies in general. It can also reflect that the American companies better identified their stakeholders than the Chinese companies, who are still in the relatively early stage of breaking away from government dominance and identifying and serving stakeholders other than the government and its delegating entities.

…

With the mentioning of “talents” added to the category of “employees” for the Chinese companies, we can see that the Chinese companies place substantially more emphasis on their employees.

…

In the context for the Chinese companies, “community” most of the time points to the relationship with local government and its branch institutions. Due to the nature of a government-dominated society, there would not be community if it were not for the local government. So it is naturally that the Chinese companies only see government rather than “community”. In contrast,  in industrial countries (with US as being representative), social movements claimed by activist groups and the legislation and judiciary practice force and encourage enterprises to take part in corporate social change activities (Hond and Bakker, 2007) which refer to initiatives to improve social good and well-being of communities in local and global levels (Bies et al., 2007). The Chinese enterprises did not have such external compliance mandatory as in the US, and therefore would be less motivated in the related aspects.”

About the second half of this suggestion (underlined and highlighted), we downloaded five articles published on Sustainability, 17 (11), and the articles did not have underline or highlights for the indication of their outcomes. So we followed the format of the puboliushed articles on the journal.

- "Section 6 should be restructured and included in the "Conclusions and future research" section (Section 5)"

We restructured the last two sections.

We originally had

Section 5. Conclusions

Section 6. Implications and Future research

We restructured the contents of these two sections, and reorganized them into:

Section 5. Conclusions and Implications

Section 6. Future Research

- "For the references section, you should use the Abbreviated Journal Name. Check the required format."

We have adjusted all references according to the required reference format in the references.

Again, we the author team sincerely thank you for your constructive comments and suggestions for the revision and improvement of our manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your improvements. The paper now achieves a sufficient good level. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive assessment. We greatly appreciate your suggestions that made our revision a success.

Reviewer 2 Report

I was just satisfied about the improvements. I confirm my positive judgement about your research. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive assessment. We greatly appreciate your suggestions that made our revision a success.

We have made a complete, word-for-word examination and re-write of the paper. It is now in a status significantly better than that in your second read.

Thank you very much again for your great help.

Reviewer 3 Report

The piece requires extensive editing of language - at present it comes across as translated into English, e.g. p. 5. l. 182-184: "There were plenty of studies using companies in the Fortune 500 list as samples of largest companies to explore various cross-national business topics" would be better expressed as "Several studies utilise the Fortune 500 list as a sub-sample of large companies in cross-cultural business and management research." I would then expect to see more than two citations of studies that do this. There are also problems beyond this with language, e.g. p. 16 l. 601 "a lessor extend of corporate pertinence".

Despite the revision, the link between mission statement and the sustainable development of corporate social responsibility is not made clear. CSR is mentioned once at the end of the piece, and social responsibility mentioned once on p. 12.

Given the topic, I would expect to see further literature relating to the specific linguistic features and utility of mission statements, e.g.:

Allison, J., 2017. Advancing strategic communication through mission statements: creation of a natural language taxonomy. Academy of Strategic Management Journal, 16(3), pp.1-15.

Desmidt, S., 2016. The Relevance of Mission Statements: Analysing the antecedents of perceived message quality and its relationship to employee mission engagement. Public Management Review, 18(6), pp.894-917.

Sun, Y. and Jiang, J., 2014. Metaphor use in Chinese and US corporate mission statements: A cognitive sociolinguistic analysis. English for Specific Purposes, 33, pp.4-14.

Swales, J.M. and Rogers, P.S., 1995. Discourse and the projection of corporate culture: The mission statement. Discourse & Society, 6(2), pp.223-242.

Overall, I am not sure that the piece finds much of interest. This may sound harsh, but let's look at these implications:

"(1) Chinese businesses should strengthen the understanding of the role of mission statements, and continue to enrich and improve mission statements in contents and verbal expression. Mission is the reason why an enterprise exists." - this is a fine ideal, but has been established for decades.

"(2) Chinese businesses should develop a mission statement that is closely related to business and management. [...] Chinese enterprises should take both national interests and self-development into consideration." - agreed, but both of things are already known.

"(3) Chinese businesses should raise keen awareness of the need of customers and be devoted to providing high quality products or services for the customers." - has anyone ever suggested or argued anything else?

"(4) Chinese businesses should pay comprehensive attention to the role of stakeholders and put it into practice." This is a simple restatement of stakeholder theory, and adds nothing to the literature.

Unfortunately the implications do not offer anything that we didn't already know. The data and statistical analysis is fine, but as a whole the piece does not make clear contributions to the literature.

Author Response

First of all, THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your frank comments. We have made great efforts to address your concerns. Here please allow me to provide a point-to-point response to your major comments, in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors,

Many paragraphs are not documented. For example "A mission statement that is properly stated will (...)". In this form it may not be considered for the Sustainability journal.

The paper must be reviewed, and responses to the recommendations of the reviewers must be implemented.

Best Regards,

Reviewer.

Author Response

THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your comments and advice. The following are your concerns and what we have done to address your concerns:

"Many paragraphs are not documented. For example "A mission statement that is properly stated will (...)". In this form it may not be considered for the Sustainability journal."

In response to the above comment, a citation was provided to document the source of the idea or the statement.

"The paper must be reviewed, and responses to the recommendations of the reviewers must be implemented."

The paper has been COMPLETELY re-examined, word for word.

Throughout the whole paper, over 120 corrections and revisions were made, from spelling, tense, use of phrase, sentence structure, to the connection and transition between sentences, and the flow of logic.

Among the 120 plus changes, a dozen of them were re-write of the length of two lines or more, with a whole new paragraph of 7 lines (813-819) added in the “Conclusions and Implications” section, with the first point in the same section being deleted (so the current point number 1 in the Conclusions and Implications section was the original point number 2, and the new point number 2 is completely newly added).

THANK YOU very much for your comments that made this round of revision a major improvement and a success!