Maintaining legitimacy through the integration of discursive and visual strategies: A multimodal study of incumbents’ clean energy facilities in China

Abstract

While clean energy facilities (CEFs) play a crucial role in advancing the energy transition and in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, incumbents in the clean energy market often face public concerns stemming from wrongdoing and accidents within the industry, prompting them to engage in legitimacy maintenance for their CEFs. We know little about the specific strategies incumbents employ for this purpose. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study focusing on the State Power Investment Corporation Limited (SPIC) in China. Our findings extend existing research on organizational legitimacy by revealing five discursive and three visual strategies of legitimation. We further highlight two specific forms of intermodal associations between discursive and visual modes: concurrence and complementarity. Moreover, our study contributes to the energy transition literature by explaining how these discursive and visual strategies benefit incumbents in the clean energy market.