The Norwegian Dugnad in Times of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

On 12 March 2020, the Norwegian government instigated measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, the most drastic policies of any Norwegian government in peacetime. A particularly Norwegian metaphor used when introducing those measures concerned the “dugnad” tradition, a cultural practice of voluntary work carried out as a community. This article traces the trajectory of dugnad metaphors related to COVID-19 in Norwegian public discourse, to shed light on the aptness of their use. Aptness is measured in terms of “resonance,” the public reception to the metaphor. It follows a threefold categorization: imposition, endorsement, or resistance, all of which are divided into inductively developed subcategories. The data consists of all relevant concordances of the lexeme DUGNAD appearing from March 2020-June 2021 in one of the three largest Norwegian national online newspapers. Findings indicate that the imposition of the dugnad struck a chord with the Norwegian people; supportive statements far outweighed those of opposition and continued throughout the investigated period, even though national government officials mostly stopped using the dugnad metaphor after May 2020. Resistance was nevertheless also present from the outset, reaching a renewed peak around March 2021. Aptness thus varies over time, a finding with implications for future pandemic communication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Replication and supplemental data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the online data depository DataverseNO at https://doi.org/10.18710/3JRV40.

Notes

¹ All translations are mine. The Norwegian source texts for all cited examples are available as supplemental data (see data availability statement).

² #ReframeCovid is available here: https://sites.google.com/view/reframecovid/home

³ Norwegian Newspaper Corpus Bokmål. 2020. Created by the project Norsk aviskorpus. Distributed by the CLARINO Bergen Centre: hdl:11495/D9B5-0349-4330-0

⁴ Throughout the article, the use of capital letters when referring to dugnads (i.e. DUGNAD) indicates reference to the lexeme.

⁵ For example, sports associations lost income because they were unable to hold traditional dugnads during the pandemic.

⁶ Note that no cases of DUGNAD relating to COVID-19 occurred in January or February 2020.

⁷ Figures 4–6 follow the same pattern.