Abstract
This article applies interpretative repertoire (IR) analysis to data collected in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic to unravel the dynamics of collective meaning-making under the strain of a critical situation. We claim that the pandemic should be viewed as a normative crisis, that is, an event that reorganizes the symbolic resources of a society. IR analysis allows for the identification and reconstruction of symbolic frameworks activated under critical circumstances and explains agency (re)distribution induced by the pandemic. The analysis encompassed two data sets: twelve focus group interviews (FGIs) conducted before the pandemic and nine FGIs carried out in April and May 2021. Applying corpus linguistics methods and tools, we identified key lexical resources and dominant IRs that framed life in Poland before and during the pandemic. We demonstrated that our interviewees employed these IRs to construct distance between the individual and society, as well as between society and the authorities. We show that meaning is not constructed from scratch even during a critical situation. In Poland, existing symbolic frameworks derived from socialist and individualization discourses served to make sense of the novel circumstances.
The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply reorganized the living conditions of the affected populations, rearranged their symbolic resources, and revised the ways in which individuals articulate and conceive of the relationship between themselves and the collective (other people, states and their institutions, or supranational organizations). The pandemic presented a “normative crisis” 1 for affected societies, that is, a situation in which organizational rules hitherto in force were suspended or neutralized, and the members of these societies needed to collaboratively construct, adopt and enforce new rules for action.
Existing sociological literature usually envisages a normative crisis that stimulates the emergence of a novel normative structure as a spatially and temporally restricted situation: a riot, a protest, or a collective outburst. 2 The COVID-19 pandemic was a differently structured crisis—global, total in terms of affected spheres of social life, and prolonged. 3 The challenge presented by the pandemic was systemic in nature. It required a collective response from the affected populations: institutions had to articulate and enforce new rules for the everyday organization of collective life, individuals had to reflect on their interpersonal relations and agree on novel modes of sociality, and new collective actors assumed agency, that is, the ability to produce “particular effects on the world” and other people. 4
This article explores the impact of such a structured normative crisis on the basic symbolic frameworks of society. In particular, we investigate how the normative crisis brought about by the pandemic affected conceptualizations of the relationship between the individual and the collective, which include the attribution of agency. We argue that these conceptualizations influenced the effectiveness of the collective response to the crisis, shaping individuals’ sense of responsibility for the situation and their compliance with guidelines regarding social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccinations.
To investigate the emerging frameworks of meaning under the pandemic, we take the Polish society as a case study. In Poland, pandemic-related suffering, indicated by high levels of COVID-associated mortality, did not lead to compliance with health recommendations. 5 The lack of compliance was most evident in widespread vaccine refusal. 6 By unraveling collective patterns of thinking and feeling in Polish society, we shed light on the emergence and re-articulation of meanings during a prolonged normative crisis and contribute to public health management in the highly distrustful post-socialist societies that Poland exemplifies.
The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Normative Crisis
Studies analyzing the connection between adaptation to the pandemic and the forms of relationships linking the individual to the collective frequently utilize the concepts of “social trust” and “social capital.” 7 They employ these categories to argue that social cohesion translates into collective resilience, which enhances the coordination of collective action. The lower levels of social trust in Poland, compared to those in Western European countries, partially account for the trajectory of the pandemic in Poland. 8 Similarly, existing research demonstrates that social factors, such as wealth inequality, low levels of social cohesion, and diminished civic engagement, have contributed to increased COVID-19 mortality rates. 9
On these grounds, some researchers argued that the crisis induced by the pandemic differed in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) from the one in Western Europe. 10 For Bohle and Eihmanis, the pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities of ECE societies such as limited health care service capacity, patterns of social exclusion, xenophobia and nationalism that undermine social coherence, populism that erodes democracy, and the peripheral and dependent nature of capitalism. These factors resulted in excessive mortality during the pandemic, and further developments such as the economic crisis. 11
Analyses of these vulnerabilities emphasize the connection between democratic backsliding and pandemic management. The health emergency, as observed at the onset of the pandemic, “represents a new and unparalleled stress-test for the already disrupted liberal-representative democracies.” 12 During the pandemic, Poland, like Hungary, exemplified a society deeply affected by the erosion of democracy and the rise of populism and social conservatism. 13 The ruling populist Law and Justice Party exploited the outbreak to further restrict civil liberties and consolidate power by insisting on holding the presidential elections scheduled for 2020, despite pandemic-related restrictions and the absence of appropriate and transparent legal solutions to regulate the organization of elections under such circumstances. This was perceived as indicative of advancing democratic backsliding. 14 In this context, the pandemic exacerbated authoritarianism in ECE and the ongoing illiberal turn. 15 This conclusion may appear ungrounded in light of the results of the 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland. However, available analyses convincingly highlight the disparities in the course, context, and impact of the pandemic between ECE and Western Europe. This suggests that the factors influencing a society’s resilience in the face of the pandemic are predominantly collective and shaped by social forces.
We further this approach by conceptualizing the pandemic as a normative crisis and by looking at the dynamics of the pandemic through a cultural lens. Our focus is on sense-making understood as a collective dynamic embedded in shared symbolic resources. In our approach, socially shared frameworks of understanding mediate sense-making in general, and agency attributions that locate responsibility and causality. We refer to the collective aspect of human functioning as a “social system,” by which we mean the “interaction of a plurality of actors.” 16 By doing so, we offer a perspective complementary to approaches claiming that social solidarity or social coherence underpinned responses to the pandemic challenge. The notion of social solidarity focuses on “responsibility towards the community at large, and especially with the underprivileged and vulnerable members of the community,” 17 for example, minorities or individuals in dire economic situations, such as migrant workers. 18 In contrast, the social system refers to broader collective frames that both enable and circumscribe individual opportunities and potentials for action, including social solidarity or exclusion, and perceptions of self in the context of the collective.
The concept of a normative crisis emphasizes the effort which an affected collective must invest into making sense of the novel situation. To some extent, it echoes “cultural trauma,” a notion that highlights the collective emotional dynamics triggered by profound transformations. 19 The concept of a normative crisis, however, directs our attention toward collective meaning-making. A normative crisis “creates a sense of uncertainty and urgency” and induces action through which new, transient, rules emerge. 20 In their discussion of normative crises, Turner and Killian focused on emergent behavioral norms which temporarily substitute traditional institutional practices, in particular, situations of collective action (especially in crowds). 21 We further their argument by reflecting upon the consequences of a reorganization of Polish society’s in-depth symbolic frameworks induced by a profound and prolonged crisis which penetrated societal organization thoroughly. In this analysis, we trace collectively shared thinking patterns employed to interpret the pandemic reality against the backdrop of pre-pandemic conceptualizations of the relationship between the individual and the social system. Thus, we shed light on the underlying cultural resources that shaped the collective response to the pandemic, mediating social coherence and resilience.
Methodology
This study identifies interpretive repertoires (IRs) that underpin thinking and feeling about the reality of the pandemic. IRs bridge the gap between individual utterances (individual acts of speech) and the broader social context in which those utterances nest and from which they draw. To further existing IRs approaches to health-related issues, we employed corpus linguistics tools. 22 This study compares two sets of focus group interviews (FGIs)—conducted before and during the pandemic. In contrast to individual interviews, the FGIs are a less intrusive research method that allows an exploration of the language, concepts, and cognitive constructs used to describe and interpret a given aspect of social reality. 23 This makes FGIs a data collection technique well suited to identify IRs.
The first corpus—which we labeled C-18—consists of twelve FGIs conducted in selected cities, differentiated by size and location in Poland (four FGIs in a metropolis, four in a medium-sized city, and four in a smaller town). We conducted interviews in locations of various sizes to gather insights and perspectives from individuals residing in diverse regions of Poland, each with its structural and cultural context. The interviews were conducted in April 2018, that is, two years prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, as part of a project funded by the National Science Centre (Poland), grant no. 2016/21/B/HS6/03199. Each focus group consisted of eight persons, with an equal number of men and women. Besides the size of the place of residence, the recruitment criteria included age, education level, income, and political orientation. Ten groups consisted of middle-aged interviewees (aged thirty-five to fifty-five), and two groups of individuals either young (below twenty-five) or elderly (above sixty-five). Nine groups involved individuals with at least a middle education level and middle income, one group consisted of pensioners, another of young people with a mortgage, and still another of individuals occupying lower workplace hierarchy levels (subordinate employees). Nine out of twelve groups included voters of the same parties (the ruling Law and Justice party, the opposition Civic Platform, and minority parties), whereas the tenth group included people who had voluntarily refrained from voting in the previous elections. Interview questions focused on the quality of everyday life in Poland, emphasizing daily “pains and joys,” work quality, challenges of family life, the neighborhood, political dynamics, and daily interactions in social life.
The second corpus—which we labeled C-21—encompassed nine FGIs conducted online in April and May 2021, that is, approximately one year after the onset of the pandemic, using internal funding from the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Sociology. Due to the pandemic, we conducted these interviews online via Zoom, with participants from three cities (a metropolis and two medium-sized cities located in different regions of the country). The focus groups consisted of five to eight participants, seven with an equal ratio of men and women, and two female-only. Besides the place of residence, the recruitment criteria included age, working mode (i.e., online or onsite), and attitude toward pandemic containment measures. Participants in five groups were middle-aged (thirty-five to fifty-five) with shared working circumstances. Two groups were composed of young participants (below twenty-five years of age), and the remaining two of the elderly (above sixty-five). Every group shared similar views on the anti-pandemic policy implemented at the onset of the outbreak, which included mask mandates, social distancing measures, lockdowns, and restrictions on social mobility and activities. Participants in four groups held a negative attitude toward these measures, four groups included individuals who supported these measures, and one group consisted of individuals holding mixed views. The interviews focused on the challenges of everyday life in Poland during the pandemic: memories from the first and second pandemic waves, opinions about the government’s actions, sources of information about pandemic developments, the organization of work, family life, social ties and contacts, and daily interactions in various contexts.
Despite the differences in the construction of these two sets of FGIs, the interviews followed a similar design, thus allowing the comparison between the two sets. First, in both cases, during recruitment, we ensured diversified experiences and living circumstances among participants, but maintained the in-group homogeneity of attitudes toward selected aspects of social reality, in line with methodological guidelines according to which homogeneity within focus groups enhances the discussion dynamics. 24 In the 2018 study, we composed the groups based on political orientations, which at the time translated into significant social divisions in Poland. 25 In the 2021 study, we based the selection on attitudes toward pandemic containment measures, an issue that also fueled social unrest in Poland. 26 Second, in both cases, the interviews focused on participants’ experiences in particular situations, with initial questions pertaining to emotional experiences (what aspects of life and situations are sources of irritation, joy, pride, or anger). These initial questions generated themes which were discussed in detail in the interviews.
Before proceeding with the analysis, we excluded from the transcripts the questions asked by the interview moderators, the speakers’ names, notes on voice elements (e.g., “laughter”), and the brief introductory self-statements by the respondents. The constructed corpora comprised 179,878 tokens (C-18) and 108,380 tokens (C-21), including only the participants’ statements on the topics raised during the interviews.
Our analysis deploys a discursive psychological approach to communication—we perceive discourse not only as a neutral medium of meanings, but also as a social practice. 27 According to these optics, formulating and conveying thoughts constitutes a meaning-making dynamic; the speaker does not merely communicate already formed meanings, but constructs these meanings during communication. 28 In our view, culture provides a “toolkit” of symbolic means, but the speaker must actively use these cultural tools to construct meaning in a particular social context. 29 This choice becomes a legitimate object of analysis, as it reveals not only the what (the content) of symbolic resources available to a speaker, but also the why, the social processes that underpin inherently social process of meaning-making in a particular context, in this case, under the strain of novel, unprecedented circumstances of action.
To identify the IRs through which speakers construct meaning in interactions, we employed methods derived from corpus linguistics, which focus on analyzing patterns of language use in large collections of texts. 30 Specifically, this study uses an approach within Corpus Linguistics known as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), where corpus analysis supports discourse analysis. 31 Corpus linguistics as an auxiliary methodology for discourse analysis provides reproducible results, reduces researcher bias, and enhances reliability. 32 Rather than relying on the researchers’ linguistic intuition, the starting point is the identification of recurring patterns of language use. The tools of corpus linguistics offer both quantitative and qualitative insights into textual data, by enabling the calculation of measures of statistical significance, presenting data fragments in such a way that researchers can assess individual occurrences of searched-for words or phrases, qualitatively examine their collocational context, and describe semantic patterns. Corpus-assisted studies can uncover subtle and complex semantic associations that might be overlooked in more subjective qualitative analyses. One of the key methods of CADS is concordance analysis, which involves analyzing lists of occurrences of specific words or phrases along with the words appearing before and after them. 33 Concordance analysis reconstructs patterns of word use in the language and the discourse in which they nest.
This approach is particularly well suited to IRs analysis. IR represents “a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors drawn upon to characterize and evaluate actions and events” and is “constituted out of a restricted range of terms used in a specific stylistic and grammatical fashion.”34,35 IR analysis involves detecting patterns that define both the diversity and the consistency of the content and formal features of utterances. Corpus linguistics methods extract these patterns and capture meaning in context by analyzing word occurrences. 36 In corpus-based research, as in the IR approach, meaning stems from communicative contexts. In corpus linguistics, the purely lexical aspect of meaning is distinguished from the choices made by language users expressing their attitudes; a given phenomenon does not inherently attract specific meanings, but language users rather assign meanings through their linguistic choices. 37 As a result, meaning structures are not fully fixed or closed and can only be extracted by observing varying linguistic structures in actual language use. 38 At the same time, language users tend to employ ready-made, conventionalized phrases and thus corpus linguistics enables the capture of both the processual and relational dimensions of meaning-making, as well as the range of symbolic resources available to speakers for constructing their utterances. 39
This study examined the linguistic regularities present in the utterances where our interviewees—“speakers,” in IR analysis terms—positioned themselves in relation to the social system. Scrutinizing the IRs they used in these utterances unravels symbolic frameworks crucial to collective and individual adaptations to pandemic circumstances. To detail IRs revealing how interviewees distributed agency among collective actors in the context of the pandemic, we focused on several terms: the overarching term “system,” and its synonyms (“arrangement,” “structure,” “totality,” “order,” “regime”), terms denoting the plurality of individuals (“society” and its synonym “people”), and terms referring to authorities (“authorities,” “government,” and “country”). We argue that the ways in which speakers referred to these entities constitute IRs that underpin conceptualizations of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
First, we searched for selected terms in both corpora and generated concordances, maintaining a distance of five hundred characters to the right and left of the query term. As the Polish language is highly inflected, we searched for all possible forms of a given term. In addition, we examined verb and pronominal inflection statistics. We used the AntConc 4.2.0 software and the spaCy and NLTK libraries in Python. 40 Subsequently, we performed an in-depth analysis of the concordances, focusing on the functions of specific words or phrases and proposing a contextual interpretation of the linguistic patterns. On this basis, we identified the IRs used by the respondents.
Results
In the following analysis, we consider in which aspects conceptualizations of the social system articulated during the pandemic built upon those deployed in communication prior to the pandemic, and in which they constituted a novelty. Our focus is on how—in the speakers’ articulation—the social system shapes individual agency.
Perceptions of the System and Its Components
The lexeme “system” occurred thirty-five times in the C-18 corpus and twenty times in the C-21 corpus. The lexemes that we qualified as synonymous with “system” (“arrangement,” “structure,” “totality,” “order,” or “regime”) appeared much less frequently; “system” remained the most common general term that speakers used to refer to the organization of collective life. Participants of the 2018 study had difficulties indicating what a system was. They framed the social system as an undefined, abstract, and elusive collectivity “the state, the system, all the people, generally” [C-18/FGI 11]. 41 The following quote illustrates this tendency: “the word system is on everyone’s lips, we hear it all the time, everything is about a system that no one has ever seen, but the system is there and it governs everything” [C-18/FGI 6]. Although speakers found it difficult to capture the system linguistically, they framed it as oppressive and ill-disposed toward individuals. Hence the wish to function “outside” of the system; as one interviewee noted, [I would like to live] “outside of this omnipresent system, feel a free man, be independent of anyone else, of a system of any kind” [C-18/FGI 6]. In sum, our interviewees conceptualized the system as invisible but perceptible constraints to which the individual must submit. If they attempted a concretization, in the C-18 corpus, they framed the system either as generally understood economic and political determinants of individual actions or as specific state-related institutions.
The pandemic shifted the emphasis in framings of the system: in the C-21 corpus, the conceptualization as a general, oppressive reality vanished and the system assumed a specific tangible form, as participants of the 2021 study concretized it primarily as health care and public health management. They used this term predominantly to talk about the “central system” of vaccination and about regulations deriving from the social distancing policy (“the system of quarantine imposition”). In both cases, speakers from groups varying in terms of their attitudes to pandemic-related restrictions emphasized the inefficiency of the system combined with the chaotic character of decision-making: “I do not support this central vaccination system at all. I think it could be better and smoother” [C-21/FGI 2] and “No one who fell ill had a hard time, it was like a flu (. . .) but still they were stuck at home for a month and a half, because the whole system of quarantine did not work (. . .) and they were stuck at home” [C-21/FGI 6]. In the speakers’ articulation, the system’s inefficiency blocked the agency of individuals and their ability to act. This raises the following question: to whom did our interviewees attribute agency in the pandemic context and why?
Speaking of the “People”: IRs of the Population
The focus on agency and collectivity requires thinking in terms of collective actors, plural entities which speakers frame as meaningful and causative in the given context. During the pandemic, two categories of plural actors were key for the collective adaptation to this novel reality: (1) the political and health authorities who articulated and implemented prevention and control measures and (2) the population. In this section, we focus on the society subject to these measures.
In many utterances, speakers attributed agency to people as a plurality, albeit a negative form of agency. These utterances demonstrate that they conceived of the collective as a “mob”: a force which possesses negatively valued qualities such as lack of reason, knowledge, responsibility, or cognitive competence, due to which it constitutes a threat to the individual. Before the pandemic, participants in the 2018 study deployed this IR to convey a negative opinion about the society as deprived of internal control, independent reflection, and prone to submit thoughtlessly to images presented by the media. They blamed the media for exercising a bad influence over people as a collective. One interviewee, a supporter of the Law and Justice party that governed Poland at the time, stated, “such instigation of certain topics in TV has no good influence on society, because we then (. . .) only get wound up” [C-18/FGI 2]. Another—a member of the non-voting group—believed that politicians “set a bad example for society. [The media] show this [and] people also behave in a similar way, they simply don’t see anything wrong with it. Since they [the media] don’t hesitate to show such things” [C-18/FGI 7]. In other words, this IR depicted the public as easily manipulated and lacking cognitive competence, a characteristic that triggers social divisions and interpersonal aggression.
In the C-21 corpus, speakers utilized this repertoire to discuss the circulation and understanding of information. They presented society as incapable of processing complex scientific communication on health issues, especially when confronted with populist news presentation techniques. A speaker from a group of supporters of pandemic-related measures criticized such media practices by stating, Either something fits into the canon of knowledge that we have (. . .), or it doesn’t. I think that what also poses a threat is that we put a professor of infectious diseases on one side, some charlatan on the other side, they will talk to each other, and then we recognize that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The truth does not lie in the middle, the truth lies where it lies. [C-21/FGI 5]
This person further noted that “our society does not know how to search for knowledge (. . .) we need to learn how to search for information and verify it” [C-21/FGI 5]. Again, this speaker attributed limited intellectual capabilities to the society and framed this as grounds for adverse social effects, such as risky behaviors undermining pandemic management.
In the pandemic context, the metaphor of the “mob” acquired yet another layer of meaning: our interviewees presented society as a reservoir of germs, a threat for the individual and their inner circles, symbolically (as incapable citizens) and physically: speakers in the groups supportive of pandemic-related restrictions especially equated a mere “contact with society” with the risk of infection and disease. As one interviewee stated, “What are we afraid of? Well, simply . . . that we will be infected with the virus and, well, we will be ill (. . .) simply because we have contact . . . well, with society” [C-21/FGI 2]. Participants in 2021 study presented engaging with society at the level of the most rudimentary, basic interactions as physically dangerous because of the risk of contagion and aggression, which accompanied attempts to implement pandemic circumscription measures. Both speakers who opposed such measures, and those who supported them, noted and emphasized this aggression: “people have become hostile. (. . .) looking down on people without masks. (. . .) They were told to step away and heard insults of various kinds” [C-21/FGI 1]. Another relevant quote in this context highlights the tension that permeated social interactions: here I think this level of frustration is even greater, and already when you accidentally start a conversation by pointing out to someone that they are wrong or something, well, a scuffle is a normal reaction or at least a squabble about it, so it seems to me that [there is] something hanging in the air, such tension before the storm, I have at least this feeling that this tension before the storm is there and only in need of a spark. [C-21/FGI 5]
Thus, regardless of the speakers’ stance on the pandemic restrictions, members of the 2021 study did not perceive others as partners with whom meaningful communication was possible. They depicted an agreement on norms and aims of action attained through symbolic negotiations as virtually impossible. In a nutshell, our speakers perceived the society as deprived of reason or the ability to concede to argument-based persuasion. Simultaneously, they located themselves outside of this de-individualized mass,
42
observing the society as if it were an external object of reflection. The following utterance from a group of supporters of pandemic containment measures exemplifies this tendency: I began to observe with great curiosity very fast, dynamic changes, I was very curious how it would turn out, how people would react. (. . .) What caught my attention was that there was such a strong aversion in Polish society to limiting one’s own space, which in my opinion is quite [a] small [self-restriction] when it comes to simply covering one’s face. [C-21/FGI 8]
The use of this IR allowed speakers to avoid an affiliation with the collective they were describing and to maintain a cognitive and emotional distance.
Since members of the groups supportive of pandemic-related restrictions framed personal influence over others as inefficient or even impossible, they focused on the system (the authorities, the government, the bureaucratic state) as a necessary regulator of social life. They postulated tighter regulation, more control, more coercion by the system for the safety of individuals: “we are not a disciplined society, we are not a society which can respond to such crises (. . .) what works in everyday life, unfortunately, is light despotism and then you can control the society” [C-21/FGI 5]. This utterance reveals another repertoire used in talking about society—the “rebel society.”
The IR of the rebel society had already been strongly outlined in the C-18 corpus generated before the pandemic. Participants in the 2018 study often mentioned Polish society’s propensity to strike: “people protest even without knowing against what. Generally against power” [C-18/FGI 2]. And, in addition, the “Polish society very much dislikes anything being imposed on it. Yes (. . .) The worst thing for a Pole is to be told ‘you must.’ Yes. Or ‘you must not go to the church’—then he will go” [C-18/FGI 12]. This IR allowed the speakers to explain why it is so difficult to manage Polish society—they depicted compliance with top-down imposed restrictions and limitations as triggering an automatic, almost “natural” resistance.
In the pandemic context, supporters of pandemic-related restrictions employed this IR to frame these measures as a way to control society. The opponents of restrictions viewed them as a spark which could set off collective discontent and collective protests: “I am certain that if people rebelled, then the government would take the nation’s will into account” [C-21/FGI 1]. This quote indicates that this speaker sees collective action as a potential means of empowerment through which individuals, who consider themselves powerless, could reclaim agency from the social system. Agency of this kind, however, is reactive in nature, and interviewees hinted at it in response to actions of the authorities which restricted individual freedom. In this IR as well, then, speakers refused to attribute independent and constructive agency to the society. They attributed actual agency to the system represented by the authorities, whose actions activated society, albeit only in resistance.
Speaking of “Those in Power”: IRs of the Authorities
Speakers across our two studies did not view the authorities positively, although they attributed to them a high degree of agency (“Those who are at the steering wheel, in power, can do anything” [C-18/FGI 12]). The regulations imposed on society during the pandemic activated the negatively charged IR of “oppressive power.” Using this IR, speakers framed political power as causal, but antagonistic to society, with the government as its key disposer. “Oppressive power” uses its agency not only to protect society, but also to subjugate it by manipulating social life. This repertoire contrasts the interests of political power and the interests of society and presents them as divergent or even contradictory.
Interviewees across the groups in the 2021 study depicted the authorities as fearful of collective action and seeking to dominate by all means: “I don’t think that the government is very much interested in leaving the pandemic behind too quickly, they prefer to have us on their string” [C-21/FGI 9]. Another person said, “For me, this lockdown is just to make sure that [the people] don’t get out into the streets, don’t protest when they [the government] can secretly pass some strange laws (. . .) it’s clearly about scaremongering and there’s nothing we can do [about this]” [C-21/FGI 6]. This IR enabled framing the government as “they,” while “we” were the society, the people, the citizens, juxtaposed to the government. Through this repertoire, speakers presented political power and the regulations it imposed as a threat to the imagined community, the basis of social divisions and antagonisms in society, as they differentiated the statuses of individuals within the collective.
Participants in the 2018 study used this repertoire to refer to financial regulations (taxes, employment, benefits) dividing the society into “better and worse:” “We are divided into the haves and the have-nots. That’s how it is” [C-18/FGI 11]. The use of this repertoire enabled blaming politicians and their actions for social divisions; for the speakers, it was their responsibility that “the society is divided.” As one interviewee from the non-voting group stated, “these behaviors of politicians lead to terrible divisions in society. No party actually cares about the good of the country, in my opinion, but everyone pulls to themselves, just to win elections. Promise [to the public] mountains of gold, and then you know” [C-18/FGI 7]. This IR depicted social benefits and financial policy as weakening interpersonal bonds, not as positive tools deployed to level inequalities and foster social coherence.
In the 2021 study, speakers used the IR of “oppressive power” to discuss the social consequences of public health regulations. Especially, the members of groups opposing the pandemic containment measures framed restrictions intended to protect citizens’ health and life as a tool of social oppression. They emphasized their negative potential: the breakdown of social cohesion (“dividing society”) or the exclusion of selected individuals from the community (“deprivation of fundamental rights”). Such framing of public health management surfaced in discussions about vaccination and COVID certificates in these groups: if you don’t get vaccinated then you won’t fly on a plane, you won’t go anywhere, and that’s exactly how it is, that’s why this is coercion (. . .) well, most [people] will vaccinate just for that, because if not they will be excluded from society. [C-21/FGI 6]
Also, “society is divided in this regard, this is what I observe at many meetings, so let’s not hide the fact that this [vaccine certificates] is also a way to divide society on the part of the government, of course” [C-21/FGI 4]. This IR, thus, activated negative emotions (distrust, resistance) toward actions by the authorities. These emotions were already underpinning this IR in 2018, as we discussed above. The pandemic circumstances added another element—the sense that authorities ban selected individuals from society, and in this the antagonistic relationship between power and society becomes even more explicit.
The hostility attributed to the “oppressive power’s” attitude toward the society resonates with another IR that our interviewees deployed to conceptualize the relationship between the people and authorities: “arrogant power” based on domination. Before the pandemic, speakers predominantly described power as locating itself above the society, insolent and contemptuous of the people: “What scares me (. . .) is the arrogance of those in power. (. . .) ‘I am the power, and you are trash’” [C-18/FGI 12]. Interviewees from various groups in the 2018 study used this repertoire in the financial context to speak of governmental financial policy through an emotional lens: And that’s an injustice and humiliation, because after 40 years of work . . . all we got [was a symbolic pension increase]. (. . .) And when you hear what kind of money people in governments rake in, well, it’s hardly imaginable. That’s a sense of injustice. [C-18/FGI 12]
The plural used in this quote to talk about “governments” is indicative of the speakers’ framing of the power as corrupt and presumptuous regardless of a particular political affiliation.
The representation of arrogant power crystallized in the context of pandemic restrictions: “playgrounds are fenced off with a tape, so that children do not play, but the holy government goes wherever they want to” [C-21/FGI 6]. In this corpus, speakers, regardless of their attitude toward the pandemic-related restrictions, accused the authorities of positioning themselves above the people and the measures they imposed. Particularly, they framed these measures as only applicable to the people, not to the government itself; in their view, the government embodies power and “decides what we open and what we close” [C-21/FGI 1]. This IR generated acute emotional defiance against those in power and the restrictions meant to manage the pandemic, activating the “rebel society” repertoire. In the critical situation of the pandemic, the “rebel society” IR fueled distrust, defiance, and resentment toward the authorities and their recommendations: “the authorities are corona-resistant, they can have their restaurants at the government open, because they have to eat, they will not infect each other during sessions, or skiing, but we will” [C-21/FGI 6]. This irony-loaded utterance shows that “arrogant power” activates aversion toward authorities. Emotional aversion of this kind renders eliciting compliance even more problematic.
The existence of another negative IR of power complicated the matter further. To present the role of the government/authorities during the pandemic, speakers used the IR of “power-loser.” Unlike the IR of “oppressive power,” this repertoire attributes neither high agency nor ill will to the authorities—it depicts political power as inept, a characterization that our interviewees also extended to health authorities framed as closely intertwined with political power during the pandemic. The following utterance pertaining to the grounds for COVID-related mortality illustrates a close connection between power and health care, and their ineptitude: I blame mainly (. . .) the authorities and the healthcare system, as mostly what you can hear, when someone dies, yes indeed they die, but these are mainly elderly people, with complications, so they had been ill already and they died because of insufficient care or help at that time. [C-21/FGI 4]
Across the division delineated by their attitudes to pandemic-related restrictions, speakers attributed to the authorities inconsistency in decision-making and inability to plan actions: later, when the government announced that we have almost won, that you do not need to worry about coronavirus anymore and then all these restrictions were suddenly back (. . .) then we started to doubt. (. . .) Because if you said once that we had won and then suddenly it turns out that we didn’t, then something isn’t right (. . .) And everyone started checking this information. [C-21/FGI 1]
This IR emphasized that the authorities were losing control of the crisis and making haphazard decisions.
The framing of health care and its actors (doctors, nurses, auxiliary staff) as unkind toward patients, inefficient, unable to protect citizens from health hazards and a “failure” was already present before the pandemic. One of the participants in the 2018 study, a Law and Justice party voter, noted, Certainly [we should] change the health service, so that it all works better . . . . (. . .) [It should not be] that you have to wait six months or a year for an operation; (. . .) Six months is often not enough. It’s a bad system; not only are we treated the way we are treated by the National Health Service system, but they also cheat us. [C-18/FGI 3]
As succinctly put by another person, also supportive of the ruling party: “the health service is a tragedy” [C-18/FGI 2]. The pandemic context activated this widespread “power-loser” repertoire. This resulted in a loss of trust in the government and further amplified defiance toward its recommendations.
All the repertoires analyzed so far did not attribute to society positive, actual agency oriented toward precise goals and not merely reactive to imposed restrictions. Simultaneously, the pandemic activated a repertoire, which we detected only in an embryonic form in C-18, presenting society as a collective actor with positive agency. Solely this IR framed society as a subject rather than an object of social processes, with both responsibility for the state of things and the ability to influence it. The following utterance illustrates the act of locating agency in this way: “government can say things and the church can as well, but people often lack self-discipline, and if they do not realize that this is no joke, not another regular flu, then it will be hard” [C-21/FGI 5]. Another relevant citation is the following: “if we as a society do not understand that we must (. . .) observe this hygiene, of course without crazy exaggeration, but somehow prudently—then we have a chance” [to get out of the pandemic] [C-21/FGI 9].
This emerging repertoire of “civil society” emphasizes responsibility for a shared reality. As these latter quotes indicate, speakers—especially in groups supportive of the restrictions—did not distance themselves from society, they depicted themselves as part of it (“we”). COVID restrictions acquired a positive meaning, as tools enhancing social coherence and the shared sense of responsibility. 43 The “civil society” repertoire, evidenced by these utterances, unlike other identified IRs, could potentially enhance cooperation and compliance with pandemic circumscription measures—individuals and the system were depicted as bound by partnership, able to collaborate to manage the crisis.
Discussion
In this analysis, we identified IRs—“building blocks” used to construct a sense of everyday life—encoded in language that problematized the management of the COVID-19 pandemic with centrally imposed restrictions and limitations. 44 The use of IRs as an analytical tool allowed us to unravel underlying symbolic frameworks, going beyond the single-factor inference in terms of social trust and individual attitudes generally assumed in analyses of collective responses to the pandemic. 45
A symbolic framework key for collective adaptation to an infectious disease emergency consists of conceptualizations of a relation between the individual and the social system. These conceptualizations shape attributions of agency, including perceptions of one’s own influence on the situation, and identification with the collective, the state, and its institutions. We demonstrated that through the dominant IRs, speakers constructed distance between the individual and the society, and between the society and the authorities. They simultaneously positioned themselves outside of the society, which they framed as a (fearsome) object of observation, and in opposition to political power, which they depicted as a clique organized around its own interests, divergent and competing with those of the “people.”
Our results indicate a tendency to juxtapose the individual with the social system when reflecting upon the determinants of human action. Before the pandemic, interviewees presented the “system” as a space external to the self, an abstract and impersonal entity. During the pandemic, they particularized the social system as the public health management. What remained from the past was a tendency to describe it in terms of inefficiency, exclusion, and a propensity to act against the public interest. This convergence—of a novel process of a large-scale medicalization of everyday life brought about by the pandemic, and of hitherto existing symbolic frameworks—hindered adaptation to the novel demands brought about by the challenging pandemic circumstances. 46
IRs that frame the authorities can be traced back to the discourse developed during the socialist period in Poland (1945–1989). The socialist discourse emphasized the responsibility of the collective for the individual and deprived the individual of agency, expecting their subordination to the social system. This demand activated a tendency, formed in Polish society longue durée and resonating in our data, to build an opposition between society and the authorities, to frame the authorities as externally imposed. 47 This subjective sense of alienation from the supra-individual, formal aspects of social organization has long been recognized as a “peculiar” trait of Polish society, characterized by a “sociological vacuum” that exists between the levels of family and national identification. 48 The IRs of “oppressive power” and “rebel society” identified in our data illustrate how alienation transforms into opposition: our interviewees employed these IRs to emphasize that the social system restricts individuals and excessively interferes in their lives. The previously abstract tendency of the state to interfere in personal and private spheres—through financial regulations and civic duties—became acutely tangible during the pandemic. Procedures aimed at containment of the pandemic (mandatory/recommended vaccinations, regulations regarding face masks, or restrictions on movement) touched upon the most private, even physical sphere, triggering a deeply emotional opposition to the restrictions and the authorities that imposed them.
Frameworks of understanding deriving from the socialist period explain why speakers framed these restrictions and the authorities in opposition to the society, but do not explain why they position themselves outside of the society. This tendency does not stem from the socialist discourse, which constructed a “we” identity of society opposing externally imposed authorities. In our view, its crucial source is the progressive disintegration of collective, structural constraints that determined the individual’s position in society and their possibilities for action. 49 Structural individualization impacts the ways in which people conceptualize the relationship between the individual and the collective, intensifying (psychological) individuation—a perception of oneself as an autonomous individual existing outside of the network of “social interdependencies.” 50 Throughout the pandemic, individualization and individuation processes were reinforced by, on the one hand, the sense of a threat from other people embodied in the metaphor of a society as a reservoir of germs, and, on the other hand, by the politics of pandemic management, which deepened the sense of isolation and generated new social divisions.
Our results allow rethinking of an assumption present in the emergent norm theory about a nascent character of social phenomena developing and operating in normative crises. 51 The normative crisis caused by the pandemic did not lead to a significant re-conceptualization of the relationship between the individual and the social system in Poland. We relate this to the prolonged crisis caused by the pandemic: the prolonged emergency activated existing symbolic frameworks, which were adapted to capture a novel pandemic reality. Such dynamics contrast with those documented for short-term normative crises during which emergent symbolic frameworks organized collective action. 52 Our results thus indicate that the duration, intensity, scope of the crisis impact the (symbolic) adaptation to it.
Note that manifestations of proactive agency and sense of responsibility for the social reality were only marginally present in the data we analyzed, despite the tendency to use verbs and pronouns in first person singular. This is an interesting result, since other analyses indicate that individualism can be a discursive strategy employed to emphasize one’s agency and autonomy. 53 This study shows that an individualistic framing of one’s accounts does not automatically entail attributions of agency to the self: the IRs we identified were deployed to avoid attributing agency to the self, to deflect the responsibility for pandemic development: the use of “I” did not translate into framing of the self as actor/agent.
Conclusion
Interpretative repertoire analysis emphasizes that speakers deploy language to construct meaning. 54 Similar language patterns can be used to attribute agency to the self and to deflect it from oneself. IRs enable the scrutiny of meaning construction in vivo and allow the identification of symbolic frameworks which reinforce prosocial behavior. 55 This analysis also demonstrated that meaning is not constructed from scratch in a critical situation; people build upon existing symbolic frameworks to construct senses and meanings. In Poland, individualization tendencies shape these underlying frameworks of meaning and do not provide symbolic resources enabling positive framing of the collective. Those more pro-social conceptualizations are present in our data only in an embryonic form which hinders the emergence of a “we” identity. We argue that the deficit of symbolic resources enabling the construction of a shared and positive collective identity amplified individualization tendencies and hampered the effective management of a collective risk (the pandemic).
One of the counterfactual repertoires that we identified in our data could potentially enable attribution of proactive and constructive causality to society and individuals in the pandemic context. This repertoire can potentially serve in future as grounds for health-related communication with the public. Basing public health management communication on resonant, yet selected, IRs may contribute to the re-arrangement and selective activation of underlying symbolic frameworks under emergency circumstances.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our interviewees for sharing their experiences, feelings, and opinions that form the basis for the analyses presented in this article.
Funding
2018 study: part of a project funded by National Science Centre in Poland (grant no. 2016/21/B/HS6/03199); 2021 study: conducted using an internal funding from the University of Warsaw.
