Missão organizacional: o que a análise crítica do discurso revela?

The object of our study is the political and ideological content underlying the corporate discourse in mission statements by the biggest companies in Brazil. Mission statements published in the institutional homepages of the 64 companies that make up the theoretical portfolio of Ibovespa were analyzed. Data was analyzed through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and grouped into lexical categories according to their meaning and their role in the organizational mission statement. The results revealed the underlying structure of the mission discourses, allowing the identification of companies' specific profiles according to their discursive features; they also suggest that the corporate discourse appropriates the symbolic dimension in order to control and manipulate workers, legitimate companies' action in society, and naturalize the precepts of neoliberal ideology by presenting the current capitalist system as the best, only relentless mode of corporate organization and production.