Article published in:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 20:2 (2021) ► pp. 254–276

The legitimization of the use of sweat shops by H&M in the Swedish press

| Örebro University , Sweden
| Zhejiang University , China
In the Swedish news-media we find sporadic critical, or reflective, reporting on the production conditions of Swedish ‘sweat-shop’ factories in the Global South, used to supply Transnational Corporations (TNCs). In this paper we carry out a critical discourse analysis, in particular using Van Leeuwen’s social actor and social action analysis, to look at examples from a larger corpus of 88 news reports and editorials from the Swedish press, between 2012–2017, which report and comment on activities of the Swedish company H&M in relation to its production chains. Analysis reveals how these recontextualize events, processes and motives, to represent Sweden and Swedish TNCs as characterized by a benevolent, democratic, humane, form of capitalism, drawing on discourses of a former social democratic Sweden of the 1960s before it became highly neo-liberalized. This nationalism converges with other discourses promoting the exploitation of the Global South.
Keywords: Sweden, nationalism, transnational corporations, sweatshops, fashion industry, working conditions, news
Published online: 10 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20015.cot
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