Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Air Transport Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jairtraman What do airline mission statements reveal about value and strategy? Kris M.Y. Law a , Kristijan Breznik b,c,* a FJ 408, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong b International School for Social and Business Studies, Mariborska cesta 7, 3000 Celje, Slovenia c Environmental Protection College, Trg mladosti 7, 3320 Velenje, Slovenia ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Organizational culture Mission statement Content analysis Network analysis Airlines Text analytics ABSTRACT A proper mission statement enriched with specific values and culture is essential for effective communications in this industry field. This paper explores the key values embedded in the mission statements of airline companies, and how values are correlated to their strategies. Content analysis and consequently network analysis among the obtained keywords were carried out in this study. Six content dimensions in the mission statements of airline companies were identified as: ‘service’, ‘customer’, ‘concern for stakeholders’, ‘concern for strategy’, ‘competitive advantage’ and ‘development’. In addition, the method of islands on airline networks offers a viewpoint from another perspective. Six core values are identified and reported: ‘tourism’, ‘excellence’, embrace’, ‘transport and continuity’, ‘growth’ and ‘low-fare’. The findings confirm that by employing content analysis advanced network techniques can serve to study mission statements and other similar texts. Moreover, applied text analytic tools through visualization of data represents a new approach in the field of organization study. This research adds to the existing knowledge of the role that mission statements play in airline management. 1. Introduction A mission statement is crucial to success in effective strategic management (Bart et al., 2001), which not only reflects the value of a company, but also serves as a tool for the growth and development of the company (Alavi and Karami, 2009). Mission statements are for communicating the culture and value propositions within the company, while some are specifically for conveying the messages to external stakeholders regarding profitability and customer satisfaction. Among various kinds of service industries, the airline industry has its own distinct industry specifics: airlines share similar business models. To effectively communicate the values across an organization within the airline industry, a proper mission statement enriched with the values and culture of the organization is essential. Mission statements can reveal distinct operational performance and financial outcomes. Therefore, for a comprehensive evaluation of an organization's performance, mission statements should be reviewed so that the core values embedded can be identified (Bart, 2007; Bartkus et al., 2004, 2006; Bartkus and Glassman, 2008). Most airlines worldwide have their own unique mission statements (IATA, 2016), however, there have been only a few studies relating to the mission statements of airline companies. The importance of the mission statement study has been neglected and this research adds to the existing knowledge of the role that mission statements play in airline management. This study aims to identify the key values em- bedded in the mission statements of airline companies and additionally to reveal which airlines share similar mission statements and what is the common context. In order to achieve this goal, the mission state- ments of 200 of the best ranked airlines worldwide were collected and analyzed. Content analysis and network analysis are the methods used to explore the key content dimensions from the mission statements. The rest of the paper is constructed as follows: in section 2, we present the theoretical background of the research and two research questions are posed. Section 3 describes the methodology used in the paper, while Section 4 shows the results. Section 5 provides discussion of the results and the last section gives the conclusions. 2. Theoretical background 2.1. From organization vision, mission to strategy Organizations have visions of their desired future, which define the conceptual roadmap or strategic direction (Mirvis et al., 2010). Vision is considered as the driving force for organizations for gaining competi- tive advantage since vision influences intra-organizational development (Sutcliffe and Vogus, 2003; Costanza et al., 2015; Klimas, 2016). A vision statement also describes how the future will look if the organi- zation achieves its mission, containing information that is realistic, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2018.04.015 Received 24 August 2017; Received in revised form 11 March 2018; Accepted 13 April 2018 * Corresponding author. International School for Social and Business Studies, Mariborska cesta 7, 3000 Celje, Slovenia. E-mail addresses: kris.law@polyu.edu.hk (K.M.Y. Law), kristijan.breznik@mfdps.si (K. Breznik). Journal of Air Transport Management 70 (2018) 36–44 0969-6997/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T