‘Where Others are not Able to Safeguard the Rights of Children’: Legitimizing Transformation of Social Identity and Practice in Save the Children Sweden

Abstract

The aim of my study is to describe how a change within Save the Children Sweden (SCS), formerly working only with advocacy, but lately working also with welfare services, was legitimized. Secondly, I investigate how van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework for recontextualization may be used to highlight legitimation of social identity. I collected a one-million-word text corpus complemented by ethnographic field notes (240,000 words) and performed a legitimation analysis to investigate how social identity and practice were justified. For this purpose, intertextual and interdiscursive elements in the legitimation criteria were included. Results show that van Leeuwen’s framework may indeed be used for legitimation of social identity if intertextual and interdiscursive elements are added. In the corpus for this study, only the strategies of authorization and rationalization were used to legitimize identity. I attribute this finding to the close links between authority (tradition, habit etc.) and identity, and to the fact that the new identity of SCS seems rational in terms of attracting more funds and of finding new solutions to old problems.