“A WORLD-CLASS UNIVERSITY” A legitimation analysis of five Swedish universities’ information brochures in English

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the University of Gothenburg, Lund University, Stockholm University, Umeå University and Uppsala University – five of the biggest universities in Sweden in terms of enrollment – legitimize Swedish higher education in their information brochures in order to attract international students. The study is mainly based on Theo van Leeuwen’s theory and model (2007) of legitimation, and a legitimation analysis is conducted with the aim of finding out which legitimation strategies the five universities use to explain and justify their practices. At its core, the legitimation analysis is a qualitative text analysis which studies the linguistic features of the material. The analyzed material consists of five multimodal information brochures in English – one brochure from each university – which essentially contain information about the universities’ education and research. The results of the analysis show that the five universities primarily use the legitimization strategies authorization, moral evaluation and rationalization. Thus, the universities try to influence and convince prospective international students by having different types of authorities exercise their authority, by expressing specific moral values that the readers should share, and by making the purposes behind their practices appear rational and reasonable. The results are also discussed in terms of how the universities’ choice of legitimation strategies may have been affected by the social contexts in which they were produced.