Konsten att legitimisera ohållbar klädkonsumtion : En kritisk diskursanalys av H&M och NA-KD's CSR-kommunikation

Sammanfattning: The fashion industry's enormous environmental impact has received a lot of attention, but despite this it continues to grow, partly due to the emergence of the fast fashion segment. This fashion segment mass produces cheap, poor quality, disposable clothing at a high speed with major environmental and social impact. Due to an increased consumer awareness of sustainability most companies communicate their corporate social responsibility (CSR) to legitimize their business. The purpose of this essay is to study what linguistic and semiotic elements that the fast fashion companies H&M and NA-KD use to frame the sustainability discourse. The theoretical framework includes theories of CSR, Fairclough's perspective on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Barthes's take on semiology. Fairclough's CDA and Barthes’s semiology were applied to the study methodologically as well. The analysis showed that the communication is perceived to be used primarily for the purpose of creating increased sales by building an attractive green(washed) image, and secondarily acting as a reporting of actual sustainability work. The two companies generally had a low interdiscursivity, which revealed the discursive practice’s aim to reproduce the prevailing discors order. In conclusion, the study shows that above all, the companies aim to maintain the hegemonic structures that shape the industry’s ideology and continue to capitalize on the commercial system Keywords: Fast Fashion, Corporate Social Responsibility, Greenwashing, Critical Discourse Analysis, Semiotic Analysis.