The Discursive Construction of Legitimation

This chapter investigates how legitimations are added to representations of social practices, and how the same practices may be legitimized differently in different contexts. Key categories of legitimation include various forms of authority legitimation—personal and impersonal authority, expertise, and role modeling—as well as rationalization legitimations, moral evaluation legitimations and ‘mythopoesis’. The chapter discusses the linguistic and visual realizations of legitimation and shows how analyses of social practices can be integrated with legitimation analyses, and how legitimation theory can be applied to critical discourse analysis.