This chapter presents a theory of texts often used in Scandinavian “sakprosa” research. In the chapter, the constitutive features of any text are presented. It is shown how the text as a cultural artefact has the quality of and at the same time being a unique utterance and instantiating a text norm. In the text theory presented, text is part of a text culture, to which other text sharing similar norms belong. Thus, a “text” is conceived as an utterance that competent participants in a specific cultural time and space assign a certain cultural value.

It is now common for public institutions, and other organizations, to be administrated and managed through digital systems. Such systems are aligned with a discourse of positivity, of doing things better, more effectively. In this paper, using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we analyze one digital system used in Swedish preschools called Unikum, built around the national targets in the new national curriculum. Our analysis considers the affordances of the digital system, the uses to which these are put, and the designs of its interfaces. Such systems set up a kind of information infrastructure where things and processes are coded and classified, providing locked-down positions, infused with power, where there is only one way of construing the world. We show how Unikum brings a marketized, customer oriented, ideology of teaching and learning into preschools, displaying a bright and optimistic world where all children are developing. This leads to incredible levels of performativity as teachers must communicate constantly using the codifications carried by the system as if everything was improving. The process comes at a cost of side-lining professional skills and also the very children themselves.

There has been an increase of food products marketed through buzzwords like organic, ‘local’, ‘recyclable’, ‘Fair-trade’. These have been described as part of a newer kind of ethical or emotional capitalism,where consumers can align with political issues through acts of shopping. The problem is that such actsreplace or shape what we know about, and how we act towards, actual socio-political matters. In thispaper, we look at one example of such a product: Oatly, a milk alternative, which brands itself as sustainableand anti-corporate. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytical approach, we want to learnmore about how such brands do not actually state details of the socio-political issue alongside which theyalign (its causes, process, solutions) yet successfully communicate a compelling sense that buying theproduct is a form of social activism in a way which cleverly implicates consumers to internalize its valuesand give them a powerful sense of being part of a political moral order. And this is a form of activismwhich is fun, chic and rather easy.

It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we need to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new.

There has been an increase of food products marketed through buzzwords like ‘organic’, ‘local’,‘recyclable’, ‘Fairtrade’. These have been described as part of a newer kind of ethical or emotionalcapitalism, where consumers can align with political issues through shopping. In this paper, welook at the brand Oatly, a Swedish milk alternative that has had global success. Oatly brands itselfas sustainable and offers us the chance to save the planet by buying their oat milk. We carry out acritical multimodal discourse analysis of their value-based marketing communication. The resultsshow that Oatly mixes the antagonistic and the playful and utilizes various semiotic materials inrefined ways. We find signifiers of clear and direct political action from former times, for examplein film clips and packaging design. The playful runs through many poster campaigns with postersthat refer to each other, where we should engage in a kind of hide and seek. The meta-communicationthat arises when Oatly says it is not advertising presents the company as an underdog thatgoes against the milk industry. Overall, this is a form of activism which is fun, chic and rather easy.Our critique of this kind of marketing communication is that acts of consumption shape what weknow about, and how we act towards, actual socio-political matters. If global large companies areto control our money and feelings and decide how environmental problems are defined, we mightnot be able to save the planet.

Alla sakprosatexter är multimodala, och denna artikel diskuterar relationen mellan sakprosaforskning och multimodalitetsforskning. Artikeln adresserar två frågor: Hur kan forskning om multimodalitet och sakprosa stimulera varandra? och Hur förhåller sig nordisk sakprosaforskning till en vidare multimodal forskningstradition? För att besvara dessa frågor tecknar artikeln multimodalitetstraditionens utveckling samt härleder sakprosabegreppets ursprung. I ljuset av såväl äldre som nutida sakprosaforskning argumenterar artikeln för att sakprosabegreppets multimodala potential huvudsakligen ligger i förledet sak eftersom det riktar ljuset mot textens roll som ett yttrande om verkligheten inom en institution. Således argumenterar artikeln att samspelet mellan verbalspråket och andra semiotiska resurser bör stå i centrum vid studiet av sakprosa, oberoende av om det handlar om ett samspel mellan verbalspråk och t.ex. visuella, rumsliga eller auditiva resurser. Detta pekar slutligen på nödvändigheten i att uppmärksamma hur olika affordanser – dvs. möjligheter och begränsningar – i olika semiotiska material används i olika kontexter. Därmed blir också efterledet prosa relevant, eftersom de riktar uppmärksamheten mot kvaliteter i uttrycket.

In Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and in other linguistics oriented scholarly journals we now see more research which draws upon multimodality as part of carrying out analyses of how texts make meaning, in order to draw out the ideologies which they carry. However, much of multimodality is itself based closely on one theory of language called Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). And despite calls from some scholars there has been no real interrogation of the concepts and models drawn from this theory as regards how suitable they are both for analyzing different forms of communication and for answering concrete research questions of the nature asked in CDS. In this paper we assess the core principles, taken from SFL into multimodality. Using examples we consider which are more or less suitable for the kinds of work we do in CDS. We make a case that SFL has a narrow notion of ‘texts’ and a weak notion of context. We show how we can address such problems to deal with what we call the ‘materiality’ of multimodal communication.