En flygresa genom karismans samtid : En fallstudie av SAS externa kommunikation och legitimitetsskapande

Sammanfattning: The airline sector is facing a new reality post-covid, where leisure travel is increasing around the world. Furthermore, there is a change which permeates the entire western world, where the postmodern society increasingly advocates emotional qualities over rational qualities in organizations. Furthermore, external communication in the form of ad campaigns plays an important role in not only establishing grounds for legitimacy, but also establishing a projected image for organizations. Regarding the shift to an emotional and charismatic based reality, as well as the new trend in air travel, the aim of this study is to investigate how Scandinavia's flag carrier SAS expresses its image in ad campaigns, and to seek how they attempt to obtain charismatic legitimacy. We analyze five multimodal texts from two different ad campaigns to conduct a social semiotic multimodal comparative study. The multimodal texts are retrieved from SAS 2014-campaign “We Are Travelers”, and their latest campaign “Journeys That Matter”, launched fall of 2022. The analysis is backed by Michael Halliday’s theory on social semiotics, and it also operationalizes a postmodern take on attribution theory, which seeks implementations of charismatic legitimation in both ad campaigns. Based on attribution theory, as well as the multimodal analysis, we identify themes within “We Are Travelers” of business travelers being collectivized, and themes in “Journeys That Matter” of human diversity and warmth. Furthermore, none of the ad campaigns portray the qualities needed to consider SAS as being charismatically legitimate, although “Journeys That Matter” reaches closer in that regard.