Why meaning-making matters: the case of the UK Government’s COVID-19 response

Abstract

Through analysis of the UK government's management of the COVID-19 outbreak, this paper offers an empirical demonstration of the principle of culture's relative autonomy. It does so by showing how the outcome of meaning-making struggles had impacts on political legitimacy, public behaviour, and control over the spread of the virus. Ultimately, these impacts contributed to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of UK citizens. Dividing the crisis into phases within a secular ritual passage or 'social drama', it shows how each phase was defined by struggles between the government and other actors to code the unfolding events in an appropriate moral way, to cast actors in their proper roles, and to plot them together in a storied fashion under a suitable narrative genre. Taken together, these processes constituted a conflictual effort to define the meaning of what was occurring. The paper also offers more specific contributions to cultural sociology by showing why social performance theory needs to consider the effects of casting non-human actors in social dramas, how metaphor forms a powerful tool of political action through simplifying and shaping complex realities, and how casting can shift responsibility and redefine the meaning of emotionally charged events such as human death.

Crafting Crisis Narratives

“…Support gave way to rage, as lockdowns were being re-imposed in many places. In the framing contests between exogenous and endogenous accounts of what had happened and what it all meant, the latter gained prominence during the course of the crisis (Morgan, 2020).…”

“Will my Young Adult Years be Spent Socially Distancing?”: A Qualitative Exploration of UK Adolescents’ Lockdown Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Findings demonstrate that older adolescents have grieved lost rites of passage and day-to-day teenage experiences. Though many rationalised these as sacri ces, perhaps re ecting the UK Government's initial lockdown morality discourse and sacri cial coding of public behaviour (Morgan, 2020), losses were nevertheless felt acutely. Some have questioned whether pandemic measures have been unnecessarily costly for UK youth during an important stage of development (Efuribe et al, 2020;Gruber et al, 2020), and our ndings suggest, at least to some degree, that this may be the case.…”

A Macromarketing Prescription for Covid-19: Solidarity and Care Ethics

“…As a result, systemic racism in the U.K. and the U.S. has inflated Covid-19-related death tolls among "overexposed, underprotected, stigmatised and overlooked" BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) community members (Syal 2020), a concern increasingly voiced by the marketing community (e.g., Grier and Poole 2020;Francis 2020). The naturalization of necropolitical policies-i.e., rules for deciding who should live and die-associated with ageism and ableism, especially within BAME communities-is also of growing concern (e.g., Gržinić 2020;de Jesus 2020, Morgan 2020.…”