Legitimizing sustainable game meat consumption: a discursive-visual approach to legitimacy claims

Abstract

The marketing world has become increasingly visual in its legitimacy claims, yet much scholarship has drawn on discursive approaches to legitimation. This research extends institutional theory through a discursive-visual approach to legitimation. The aim of this article is to address the need to understand how companies engage discursive-visual strategies for legitimizing products and consumption practices with the aim of engaging society in more sustainable behavior. It is based on a case study of the Swedish game meat market and identifies three strategic discursive-visual interventions that market actors engage to unsettle existing norms and meanings: 1 aestheticization and exotic framing, 2 proximity claiming and localization, and 3 discrediting institutional norms. Although prior work drawing on institutional theory tends to focus on symbolic and discursive resources, this research also emphasizes the visual practices involved in the elaboration of legitimation claims that market actors mobilize.