När krisen når kronan

Sammanfattning

This study examines how discursive legitimacy is constructed in strategic external crisis communication. Crisis communication and discursive legitimacy have rarely been studied together, although both fields examine how legitimacy is negotiated and maintained. Through a qualitative discourse analysis of multimodal media material, the study explores how language is used to manage a legitimacy threat against an institution. The study focuses on the Norwegian royal family’s communication during the crisis surrounding Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein. The theoretical framework combines Situational Crisis Communication Theory, legitimacy theory and discursive legitimacy. The analysis shows how legitimacy is discursively constructed through three different layers: first, the interplay between discursive strategies; second, how responsibility is sorted through discursive positioning; and third, how the institution relates to broader values. The findings demonstrate how legitimacy is discursively constructed through an interplay in which language continuously draws boundaries between communicative tensions within strategies, responsibility distribution and institutional values. The study contributes to crisis communication research by applying a nuanced discursive legitimacy perspective to crisis. The study’s main contribution is discursive boundary-drawing in crisis communication, which highlights how legitimacy is strategically communicated through the management of communicative tensions. In cases where an institution cannot be fully separated from the actor implicated in the crisis, discursive boundary-drawing becomes central to maintaining legitimacy.