Pushing too far? Negotiations of non-compliance and resistance to the covid-19 cabin ban in norway

Many societies experienced pushback against governmental COVID-19 measures. When the Norwegian government made it a punishable offence to spend the night at privately owned cabins in the first phase of the pandemic, this resulted in discussions and pushback. Basing our research on in-depth interviews at three different time points during the pandemic, we ask how Norwegian participants discursively explain why the cabin ban was the first measure that evoked pushback in Norway. We conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), exploring three overarching explanations provided by the interview participants. In the first explanation, the pushback was presented as a result of the cultural importance of the cabin. Here, participants partly legitimised the pushback when constructing it as a predictable reaction in this cultural context. In the second explanation, participants constructed the pushback as an expression of 'cabin people' in particular and Norwegians in general being 'too privileged' to acknowledge the measure's necessity. Here, the pushback was constructed as an illegitimate reaction. In the third explanation, participants explained the pushback as a result of people seeing the measure as meaningless. This interpretation constructs pushback as a legitimate response to an illogical measure. These different constructions illustrate the complexity of compliance with COVID measures, where people negotiated individual freedom against solidarity, and compliance against critical thinking. The article contributes to the understanding of people's negotiations of resistance and pushback against restrictive measures. We argue that social psychological theory and research need to acknowledge the temporal, contextual and ideological specificities in understanding compliance and non-compliance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

"Everybody Needs to Do Their Part, So We Can Get This Under Control." Reactions to the Norwegian Government Meta-Narratives on COVID-19 Measures.

On March 12, 2020, the Norwegian government put the country on lock-down to get the COVID-19 situation under control. Making people adhere to restrictive measures is difficult. Even so, the Norwegian government largely succeeded in getting the population to comply and became the first European country to announce control over the situation. In this study, we ask what narratives the government put forth in their communication of the measures and how these measures were handled and made sense of in personal narratives at the general population level. We base our discussion on near daily government press conferences in March-April, as well as qualitative interviews with 16 individuals. Using a cultural narrative perspective on the data, we tie these meta-narratives and personal narratives together. Persuading people to comply with prevention and control measures in a crisis is crucial, and our study shows the importance of the selection of meta-narratives. There will be cultural differences in governance and receptiveness of the population across different settings, and our study suggests that governments will have to balance where on different continua they place their COVID-19 narratives, balancing freedom up against restrictions, hope against fear, and individualism against solidarity.