Kampen om kommunikationen : En kvalitativ studie av Försvarsmaktens kommunikation och uppdrag

Sammanfattning: During the last decade, the Swedish Armed Forces have been struggling to achieve recruitment goals and to retain military personnel. To attract more people to join the agency, and to increase the knowledge about the agency’s role and function in society, the Swedish Armed Forces continuously run campaigns. Furthermore, the Swedish Armed Forces is a government agency with a mission that is determined by the Swedish government through government decisions. It can therefore be argued that it is important that the campaigns portray the agency’s mission in a correct and truthful way. The purpose of this study has been to investigate how the Swedish Armed Forces portray their mission in their campaign films, and to what extent it corresponds with the agency’s official mission. The research questions are thereby: (1) How is the mission of the Swedish Armed Forces portrayed in two campaign films from 2018 and 2020? (2) To what extent does the Swedish Armed Forces' communication about the agency's mission correspond with their official mission presented in the government decision? (3) Based on identified semiotic resources, and with a neo-institutional perspective on strategic communication, what type of communication has been allowed to take place in the Swedish Armed Forces' campaign films? To answer the research questions, a qualitative data analysis was conducted on a government decision constituting the overall direction of the Swedish Armed Forces, and a multimodal critical discourse analysis was conducted on two campaign films produced by the agency The results were compared, and analyzed through the lens of a neo-institutional perspective on strategic communication. In summary, it can be stated that the study finds that the Swedish Armed Forces, in the two campaign films, portray their mission in a way that greatly corresponds with their official mission as presented in the government decision.