Strategic COVID-19 management in communicational practice: At the crossroads to remain open or not in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden

Abstract

This chapter examines how leading politicians and representatives of the public health authorities in Scandinavia attempted to create consent for their strategic choices to adopt or refrain from collective prevention measures, such as border and school closures, when such measures became relevant in the region in March 2020. It thus also concerns the broader strategic choices of the administrations in their attempts to curb or stop Covid-19. Based on a strategy-as-practice perspective, the chapter assumes that strategies are not artefacts that organisations only possess, but they are shaped, consolidated, and made public communicatively. The analysis of statements from press conferences shows how strategies are shaped communicatively through claims regarding a number of themes: economic consequences; the validity of epidemiological measures; secondary public health effects; the issue of risk severity (and in the Swedish case, natural immunity); and risk management history. The chapter also highlights the pragmatic arguments used and the dialogicality involved when a particular strategic choice is made viable through the presentation of alternatives. The chapter thus helps to bridge a gap between major response choices facing national and agency leaders on the one hand, and on the other, numerous micro-level communication efforts facilitated in part through press conferences.