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Abstract Location: Uppsala University Level: Bachelor thesis in Media and Communication Studies Number of pages: 56 Method: The method used in this thesis is a qualitative interview study. Title: Affect your reputation! A qualitative study on how Swedish companies in the food industry try to influence their reputation through their specific communication on social media. Aim: The overall aim with this study is to understand how organizations in the food industry try to influence their reputation through communication on social media. Theories: The theoretical perspective of the study is organizational reputation and reputation on social media. Main results: The result from the interview study shows that organizations in the food industry are not communicating in the same way, contrariwise there are some common factors between the organizations in their way of influencing the reputation. The common factors are measured through the temperature on the separate organization’s users through media sourcing, communicating in a transparent and credible way and responding quickly to users. Furthermore, the result shows that each organisation find its own way of communicating on social media to influence their reputation on social media in their daily communication work. Keywords: Reputation, social media, food industry, Facebook, communication

Denna uppsats undersöker det nya fenomenet kroppsaktivism som en ny typ av digital aktivism. Det görs genom en kvalitativ innehållsanalys av två av de största svenska Instagram-kontona inom ämnet. Kontona vi valt att analysera tillhör Sara Dahlström och Stina Wollter som är inflytelserika både på Instagram och andra plattformar. Analysen tar reda på vad i det visuella innehållet som är normbrytande respektive normbejakande. Studien undersöker även vad i inläggen som gör dem till digital aktivism. Den använda metoden i studien är en multimodal kritisk diskursanalys baserat på David Machin och Andrea Mayrs bok från 2012. Studien utgår också från ett feministiskt perspektiv och inkluderar teorin ”the male gaze”. Studiens resultat tematiseras och presenteras utifrån fyra övergripande teman; ”en ärlig bild av kvinnokroppen”, ”smal vs. tjock”, ”normativa & icke normativa framställningar” samt ”förankring”. Uppsatsen svarar också på hur kroppsaktivismen blir till digital aktivism. Detta görs dels genom att kvinnorna synliggör andra kroppar än de som traditionellt syns i media, men också genom politiska budskap som förankras i inläggstexterna.

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This study takes as its point of departure the theorizing on citizenship and globalization. Today it is common to discuss a “flexible” citizenship beyond the paradigm of the nationstate, which, besides its legal aspects of rights and obligations, also includes identification with and participation in various communities, primarily political ones. “Politics”, in this context, is considered to be constituted on the micro-level, discursively between individuals (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The aim of the study is to, through the study of collective meaning making, contribute to the theory building about citizenship and globalization. The study consists of three cases, each of which attracted much media attention, with varying degrees of proximity and distance. The construction of political community, on various levels on the globalization scale (subnational, national, transnational) within the collective meaning making, is studied. The aim of the study also includes the analysis of the discursive resources that are used for the making of meaning. “External” discourses such as media messages and interpersonal communication are analyzed as well as “internal” ones: e.g. values, norms, identifications and experiences. In addition, the study aims at localizing the construction of meaning and community within the structural context , and relating it to current structures of power. The thesis is concluded with a suggestion of how to relate the discursive construction of political identity to deliberative democracy theory. The empirical material is collected by means of focus-groups interviews, including 2–5 people, with a total of 133 respondents. The transcribed material is analyzed by means of critical discourse analysis, CDA. The study identifies two different types of identity constructions: processes of nationalization, where the experienced Swedish identity and community function normatively in the making of meaning, and processes of subnationalization, among those groups that somehow felt excluded from and mistreated by the national (Swedish) environment. The thesis concludes that the collective making of meaning within an assumed national community contains ideological elements and works to a large extent in the service of power. However, the subnationally compressed communities create meaning in an oppositional manner, compared with the nationalized community and in relation to structures of power.  Active citizenship is thus best located in conflict, among groups that experience exclusion and oppression in different situations (Mouffe 1995b). If this is right, the focus must shift from consensus to communication, efforts to open up discursive bridges between the hegemonic community and dissident voices should be made (c.f. Aronowitz 1995). An important space for transgressing communication is of course the media. However, the study shows that the media must deal with some problems before they are ready to serve as discursive bridges, for instance the tendency to make the factual antagonisms subordinate to homogenizing emotional reporting. In addition, there seems to exist a need for the political institutions to move beyond the paradigm of the nation-state, and find other frameworks for the democratic processes, not least at the subnational level. Thus, instead of discussing either a global or a national citizenship one could, with Habermas (2001), reflect on a postnational citizenship relating to the reflexive transformation of national civic sovereignty into subnational and supranational citizenship.

The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate principles that guide mediated participation, taking place through the interplay between users and news producers. Therefore, the study focuses both how spaces for participation are structured (by news producers) and those that exert participatory practices (news users). The research design thus has an approach that ties together analytical strands that previously have been studied separately. The research questions concern how the conditions comprising mediated participation – in terms of opportunities for users’ participatory practices – differ between (1a) various types of online news sites, and (1b) various types of news, as well as how users exercise participatory practices (2a) on various types of news sites, and (2b) in connection to various types of news. The last research question (3) concerns how users express the connection to news producers, through participatory practices within participatory spaces. The thesis includes four papers, that together answer the research questions by applying content and text analyses to various types of news sites (big city national, local rural area, morning broadsheets and evening tabloids) and its content: news articles and features for user participation, such as comments and sharing news through social media (i.e., Facebook and Twitter). The results show that users and news producers take diverging approaches to user participation adjacent to online news. This is illustrated by the fact that the categories of news that users are most often permitted to interact with, coincide precisely with the news that users tend to decline to interact with, while the news categories that users tend to interact with (when given the chance) occur comparatively sparse. The results also show that news producers are much more prone to permit users to share news through social media, than to permit them to comment news on the news site. Almost all news are made to permit users to share news through Facebook and Twitter, whereas commenting news is substantially more restricted, and even more so among big city national news sites than among local rural area news sites. When it concerns user practices, users share news on Facebook 20 times more often than they share news through Twitter or comment news on news sites. Tweeting news almost only occurs in news sites affiliated with big city national newspapers, and most prominently so when it concerns evening tabloids. This means (when controlling for differences in circulation) that commenting as a user practice tend to have a more local character than tweeting news, with its more national focus. The connection between users and news producers is shaped by the approach these groups of actors take to each other, under different circumstances. Sharing news through Facebook and commenting on news sites, are not interchangeable practices. Nor is tweeting news from a news site affiliated with national tabloid compared to from a local morning newspaper. And although it is well known from extant research that producers hold hesitant views concerning users’ influence over content, users also express distrust when it concerns how professional media practices allow various actors salience in the media. These ideas primarily concern “elites” versus “commoners”, differences between public service and commercial media, regulations and media, including roles, genres, and formats. These ideas also concern whether representational principles should guide media representation or if certain views should be excluded, whether journalists’ political views affect media performance, and how crime news should be presented in terms of what events are published and representations of victims and perpetrators. Overall, the thesis illustrates that there are connections between various forms of electronic communication (i.e., commenting and sharing news through Facebook and Twitter), and the specific contextual and social settings that news sites are embedded within, with its specific situated audience, shaping the connections between users and news producers.

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