Text mining the mission statements of the most ethical companies

Purpose This paper explores and examines the mission statements of the most ethical companies across the globe in terms of their main purposes, values, goals, and objective, and what they say about their vision and goals. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on the data published by the Ethisphere Institute, the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices. Having compiled the mission statements into a text file, the authors conducted text mining using a commercially available text mining tool SAS Enterprise Miner to survey if the most ethical companies have valued the same vision and mission such as social responsibility and ethics. Findings A review of their mission statements indicated that some of the most ethical companies surveyed in this study such as 3M and Voya strive to be “socially responsible and ethical,” support their “societies” and respect and protect the “nature,” “planet” and “environment.” The world's most ethical companies that stress these weighted terms in their mission statements may do so to show their commitment by being socially responsible and ethical, and delivering sustainable business solutions to their customers. Originality/value This study provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of mission statements of the most ethical companies in an attempt to identify patterns of differences and similarities within these statements.