Stakeholder engagement and chaotic narrative spaces: Singapore’s COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories

ABSTRACT

In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Singapore grappled with an escalation of COVID-19 cases among the low-waged foreign workers living in dormitories. Singapore responded to the outbreak by implementing increasingly strict public health measures, which included a partial lockdown and movement restrictions of over 300,000 foreign workers. Our qualitative analysis of the texts created by three key stakeholders (the Singaporean government, local news media, and local non-profit organisations) at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories revealed the construction of contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives. These narratives manifested what our paper describes as ‘chaotic communication’, wherein conflicting and competing messages are crafted or used to build organisation-public or public-public relationships. We also propose ‘chaotic narrative spaces’ as a conceptual framework to illustrate how social, political, and organisational actors shape narratives about issues and influence the decisions made during a public health crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative analysis
• framing theory
• foreign workers
• COVID-19
• stakeholder communication
• crisis

Introduction

Between March and August 2020, Singapore witnessed a surge of COVID-19 cases in the dormitories housing foreign workers, which accounted for 53,669 (94.5%) of the coronavirus infections in the country (Ministry of Health [MOH], 2020). In the five months when the outbreak peaked among foreign workers, three key stakeholders were instrumental in (re)shaping the narratives surrounding the large-scale lockdown of over 1,000 dormitories and their cramped living spaces. The Singaporean government, local non-profit organisations (NPOs), and local news media influenced the narratives of the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories and Singapore’s experience of the pandemic – and indeed, continue to do so as Singapore moves into the ‘new normal’ of living with COVID-19. Importantly, the stakeholders’ framing of the dormitory outbreak exemplified changing expectations towards Singapore’s management of three ‘spaces’ – specifically, policy and regulatory, health and economic, and social and (digital) public spheres – and the narratives about how foreign workers fit into them. These changing expectations underpinned the stakeholders’ justifications for subjecting foreign workers to differentiated measures and receive differentiated support. Singapore’s management of the three ‘spaces’ and stakeholder narratives of low-wage foreign workers have brought to bear on organisational communication practices and the media coverage of vulnerable communities impacted by COVID-19.

In this paper, we apply narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) and framing theory (Goffman, 1974) to identify and analyse stakeholder narratives about foreign workers’ lived experiences and Singapore’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider narratives as polyphonic, wherein ‘the author (speaker) does not have the only word, that is, the authority over meaning is dispersed and embedded’ (Riessman, 2008, p. 107). We, therefore, adopt an intentionally broad definition of narrative, whereby it is ‘somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something’ (Herman & Vervaeck, 2019, pp. 170, italics in original). Through conducting a dialogic/performance analysis of stakeholder narratives (Riessman, 2008), our paper aims to reveal how the government, NPOs, and news media utilised narratives as ‘a conscious and goal-directed effort to order life and to balance relations with others and with reality’ (Herman & Vervaeck, 2019, p. 277). The realities of Singapore’s pandemic experience and the foreign workers’ lived experiences of COVID-19, as conveyed through stakeholder narratives, are ‘sequences of happenings, real or fictive, as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 10). To better understand how foreign workers in Singapore are communicatively constituted during COVID-19, we draw on our findings to propose a conceptual framework we term ‘chaotic narrative spaces’. Our framework spotlights the stakeholders’ communicative role in framing foreign workers as ‘essential’ and in transforming them into ‘subjects’, and designating responsibility for their wellbeing and the actualisation of their rights. The narratives constructed about foreign workers and how they fit into the ‘spaces’ in Singapore have lasting impacts on a country’s social fabric beyond the pandemic.

Strategic communication and chaotic communication during COVID-19

According to Falkheimer and Heide (2022), the study of strategic communication draws upon multiple disciplines, from journalism, marketing, advertising, and public relations, to organisational communication. Strategic communication focuses on how organisations communicate to their publics – internally and externally, formally, and informally – in ways that evaluate whether the communication aligns with their vision, mission, and values. Some scholars consider strategic communication as public campaigns ‘designed to persuade audiences with the goal of increasing knowledge, changing attitudes or inducing desired behaviour’ (Connolly-Ahern, 2008, as cited in Falkheimer & Heide, 2022, p. 86), or reflecting organisational intention ‘to engage in conversations of strategic significance to its goals’ (Zerfass, Verčič, Nothhaft, & Werder, 2018, p. 493). Strategic communication also relates to ‘how organisations use communication purposefully to fulfill their overall missions’ to their target publics and in different public spheres (Frandsen & Johansen, 2017). Whereas key publics form and mobilise around issues and are not intrinsically linked to an organisation, stakeholders comprise ‘any identifiable group or individual that the organisation depends on to sustain itself or even to survive’ (Wakefield & Knighton, 2019, p. 2). In this wider disciplinary context, our paper puts forward that chaotic communication occurs when conflicting or competing messages are crafted and used, inadvertently or intentionally, to engage with key publics and stakeholders and to build organisation-public or public-public relationships. Occurrences of chaotic communication are most prevalent during times of crisis, particularly when the crisis communication is aimed at ‘[persuading] others to accept [the communicator’s] views on a wide range of issues’ (Johnston & Taylor, 2022, p. 384). Chaotic communication can also occur in both public and organisational communication when conveying the ‘consequences that occur outside organisations, in part because of them’ (Johnston & Taylor, 2022, p. 384). From a public relations perspective, several factors can account for chaotic communication about the potential, emerging, current, crisis, and dormant issues that affect an organisation or its stakeholders and key publics (Zyglidopoulos, 2003). Competing and conflicting messages about an issue can arise depending on the issue being addressed and its maturation and evolution (McGrail, Halamish, Teh-White, & Clark, 2013). Chaotic communication can also occur because of the crisis communication strategies being implemented and when different audiences, key publics, and stakeholders are targeted or prioritised (Coombs & Holladay, 2014; Kenix & Bolanos Lopez, 2022).

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increased focus on foreign workers, not least because the global health crisis has increased their precarity and aggravated the health inequities they face in their host country. Research is emerging on the negative outcomes (e.g. difficulty sleeping) and positive outcomes (e.g. improved sanitary conditions) of the coronavirus pandemic on foreign workers’ physical and mental health (e.g. Oliva-Arocas, Benavente, Ronda, & Diaz, 2022). During the pandemic, issues impacting foreign labour became pertinent to receiving states highly reliant on foreign labour (The ASEAN Magazine, 2023) and for stakeholders mobilising resources to address gaps in policies and weak labour standards (see International Labour Organization, 2021). In Singapore’s context, the twin issues of low-wage foreign workers’ living conditions and the clusters of COVID-19 infections cropping up in dormitories attracted public attention, both domestically and internationally. The wider global attention given to the cramped living conditions of foreign workers led to the government’s subsequent communication about ramping up support and scrutiny of dormitory operators and employers (Goggin & Zhuang, 2023). Singapore’s foreign workforce makes up over 35% of its total workforce, most of them working in the construction or marine shipyard and process sector (MOM, n.d., 2022). Foreign labour has purportedly enabled Singapore to develop as a good home and place to do business, allowing Singaporeans to work in professional, managerial, executive, and technical occupations and contribute to the innovation-based economy (Lim, 2020). During the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories in 2020, the conceptions of foreign workers’ value and essentiality to Singapore and its residents proved conducive for chaotic communication to occur, leading to conflicting and competing messages about the stakeholders’ responses and actions. As our paper will discuss, the chaotic communication surrounding the dormitory outbreak led to its varied representations in media texts and how social and political actors characterised the outbreak to accomplish their communicative aims.

Sample and methods

We used Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) organisational linkage model to identify the key stakeholder groups pivotal to Singapore’s COVID-19 communication efforts at the peak of the dormitory outbreak from March to August 2020. Identifying stakeholders via their linkages to an organisation segregates them into enabling, functional, normative, and diffused stakeholders based on their relationship to the organisation, as well as their influence over and their involvement in the (crisis) situation. From a crisis management perspective, enabling stakeholders have ‘control and authority to define the parameters of the organisation’s crisis management work’ (Ndlela, 2019, p. 28). Functional stakeholders provide inputs essential to the organisation’s crisis management, whereas normative stakeholders are linked to the organisation through common interests or similar values and goals. Diffused stakeholders, on the other hand, have infrequent links to an organisation and often arise only during a crisis (Ndlela, 2019). Our mapping of stakeholders during the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories showed that public service institutions (e.g. government ministries and statutory boards) were enabling stakeholders and functional stakeholders. Local NPOs were functional stakeholders and normative stakeholders, whereas local news media were functional stakeholders. To select the specific entities to analyse, we chose public service institutions fronting Singapore’s COVID-19 management efforts, local NPOs instrumental in delivering community and government support for low-wage foreign workers in the period analysed, and local news media with a high readership that reported on Singapore’s COVID-19 situation.

Our study’s sample comprised the official texts published between March and August 2020 when COVID-19 cases were at their highest in foreign-worker dormitories. The first author analysed the official websites, Facebook pages, and Instagram pages of five prominent, local NPOs helping foreign workers: HealthServe,¹ Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics,² ItsRainingRaincoats,³ Migrant Workers Centre,⁴ and Transient Workers Count Too.⁵ In addition to the content published on the five NPOs’ websites, 313 Instagram posts, and 784 Facebook posts were also analysed. In terms of public service institutions, the second author identified six primary public communication channels that were used to convey information on the outbreak of COVID-19 in foreign-worker dormitories. The texts analysed included official communication from the Singaporean government’s main public communication website,⁶ the Prime Minister Office’s website,⁷ and Civil Service College,⁸ as well as 90 media releases⁹ from the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Manpower, and Ministry of Home Affairs. The third author examined the news articles published by the following English-language media outlets with the highest readership in Singapore – namely, The Straits Times, Channel News Asia, TODAY, and Mothership. Articles published in other vernacular languages were not included because of our limited capacity for accurately translating non-English texts and the high number of news articles. Keyword searches on Factiva and Google were used to find news articles about the COVID-19 cases in foreign-worker dormitories. News articles linked to or recommended by the original news article were added to the sample and complemented by keyword searches using terms relating to the outbreak: ‘living conditions’, ‘migrant workers’, ‘foreign workers’ ‘complaint’, ‘riot’, and ‘dormitory operator’. 209 news articles across the four media outlets¹⁰ were identified as relevant to news coverage of the dormitory outbreak.

In our analysis, we approached stakeholders as narrators and their texts as a discursive and situated communicative practice that produces, as well as performs, narratives (Riessman, 2008). We began by doing a close reading of the texts to examine how the stakeholders framed reality ‘to define a situation, to define the issues, and to set the terms of a debate’ (Tankard, 2001, p. 96). Our sample provided insights into how the stakeholders articulated foreign workers’ lived experiences, such as prolonged dormitory lockdowns, and Singapore’s COVID-19 experience, for example, the challenges of tackling and preventing transmissions in dormitories housing thousands of foreign workers. We focused on the information selected, emphasised, excluded, and elaborated on the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories, focusing on macro events (e.g. World Health Organisation’s directives) and micro events (e.g. Singapore’s announcement of a partial lockdown). We then identified salient features about how COVID-19 and the outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories were represented by stakeholders to fulfill different communicative aims. To identify the narratives in the texts we analysed, we reviewed the salient features of the stakeholders’ framing and grouped these features by communicative aims. As we will outline below, these salient features showed how the stakeholders constituted foreign workers’ lived experiences of COVID-19 and Singapore’s experience of the pandemic (Riessman, 2008).

Narratives of low-wage foreign workers and COVID-19

Our analysis revealed the construction of contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives about low-wage foreign workers and the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. These narratives explained and justified the differentiated public health measures for foreign workers and the differentiated social, emotional, health, and financial support for foreign workers. Our analysis showed that low-wage foreign workers in Singapore were characterised as dormitory residents, brothers, workers, and strangers to lobby for and against the rationalisations to extend differentiated measures and support to them. Below, we describe the three narratives and how the Singaporean government, local news media, and local NPOs used these narratives to order life in Singapore during the COVID-19 outbreak in the foreign-worker dormitories. When referring to the texts created by the three stakeholders, we will use the following terms: government texts, NPO texts, and news texts.

Contrasting narratives

The contrasting narratives captured the stakeholders’ disparate conceptions of their (perceived) responsibility, and each other’s responsibility, for foreign workers’ wellbeing and rights in Singapore. The NPO texts reflected complementary and adversarial views of their relationship with the Singaporean government, whereby they are ‘connected and coordinated with each other’ yet also ‘attempting to change the other’ (Young & Casey, 2006, p. 39). In contrast, the government texts expressively communicated their speed, teamwork, and ‘command and control’ roles. Their narration of ‘whole-of-community’ and ‘whole-of-government’ hailed NPOs and individuals as partners. A case in point was an incident involving foreign workers being locked inside their room¹¹ after their close contact had tested positive for COVID-19. In April 2020, Transient Workers Count Too, a local NPO, published Facebook posts about the ‘distress call’ they received from migrant workers who had to call security guards to unlock the door if they wanted to go to the toilet or to shower.^11,12 While the NPO’s aim was to help the affected foreign workers and they ‘do not apologise for making the saga public’,¹³ the Ministry of Manpower noted ‘there is an established channel for TWC2 to alert MOM to cases of workers who might require assistance of any form’.¹⁴ After that incident and following more COVID-19 infections in the dormitories, the Ministry of Manpower moved away from its role as a facilitator, and the surveillance of foreign workers’ health was expanded to digital surveillance via mobile phones and contact tracing applications. For instance, the Ministry of Manpower developed a mobile application to help it ‘better manage and plan deployment efforts of our officers and medical teams’,¹⁵ which served as a mode of reporting and movement control, especially of male foreign workers in the marine and construction sectors (Goggin & Zhuang, 2023). The government texts contained strong assertions of Singapore’s duty of care, responsibility, and compassion towards all workers – not simply foreign workers, a message reiterated in national broadcasts by senior political leaders.^16,17 There were constant reminders of the shared responsibility for foreign workers who were economically valuable stakeholders, which echoed ASEAN’s narratives of foreign workers’ pivotal role in a country’s socio-economic development (see The ASEAN Magazine, 2023).

The NPO texts showed a clear relegation of responsibility to other stakeholders to actualise the foreign workers’ economic rights. The Singaporean government, employers of foreign workers, and dormitory operators were expected to implement COVID-19 testing regimes, provide healthcare resources and isolation facilities, and ensure workers were paid on time and could remit money home.¹⁸ The NPOs, however, undertook responsibility for foreign workers’ civil, social, and cultural rights and to some extent, their economic rights. They solicited donations of smartphones, rice cookers, and hair trimmers, organised online entertainment during the circuit breaker, coordinated fundraising activities for displaced workers, and distributed reusable masks and hand sanitisers from corporate sponsors.^19,20,21,22 The NPOs consistently pressed for improvements to the dormitories’ cramped living conditions and raised concerns about the impacts of movement controls and prolonged confinement.^23,24,25 They also articulated the foreign workers’ lived experiences of public health measures and movement restrictions, which most Singaporean residents were not subjected to and could not fully comprehend.^26,27 Through their texts, NPOs drew attention to the experiences of foreign workers who were moved onto cruise ships after recovering from COVID-19 and flagged regulatory changes they considered were ‘draconian measures to contain and control COVID-19 among migrant workers’.²⁸

Negotiations of social tensions were apparent in the news texts’ confusing narratives about the responsibility of the Singaporean government and citizens towards foreign workers. The news texts often pinpointed, explicitly or implicitly, the ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBY) and ‘welcome in my backyard’ (WIMBY) attitudes as factors that led to the dormitory outbreak. Singaporeans’ NIMBY attitude was depicted in some news texts as the reason for the concentration of large foreign-worker dormitories in a few areas, as opposed to being dispersed throughout the island. References were made to the 2008 incident and citizen petition, when upper-middle-class citizens protested the government’s plans to build a foreign worker dormitory in their housing estate. Singaporeans were deemed as having “an increasingly classist tone and a rejection of the ‘alien’ presence of foreign workers in the residents’ midst”.²⁹ In other news texts, Singaporeans’ WIMBY attitude and grassroots efforts to meet the needs of foreign workers (e.g. translating materials for healthcare workers to use during a triage) were portrayed as positive steps in encouraging integration and cohesion.^30,31 Singaporeans rejecting foreign workers infected with COVID-19 were portrayed as xenophobic and racist. Goh’s (2019) research suggests that Singaporeans’ rejection of foreign workers resulted from differing perceptions of their real needs. Singaporeans viewed foreign workers as transient residents who do not share their sense of belonging and care for ‘home’. This perspective was compounded by the recreational practices of foreign workers, which citizens also viewed as different and strange. Here, the news texts attributing the dormitory outbreak to ‘them versus us’ attitudes can be seen to play to existing, pre-pandemic rifts between Singaporeans and foreign workers.

Confusing narratives

As COVID-19 clusters formed in the foreign-worker dormitories, there were confusing narratives presented about the seriousness of the outbreak. The narratives were ‘confusing’ because updates on the dormitory outbreak were plied using different communication channels and used to accomplish the stakeholders’ disparate aims (e.g. communicating public health measures versus launching fundraising initiatives). Multiple factors contributed to the development of confusing narratives, including the high information load created by the daily, detailed updates on the COVID-19 situation in Singapore and using terminologies unique to Singapore.^32,33,34 For instance, Singapore used the term ‘circuit breaker’, coined by Health Minister Gan Kim Yong who had a background in electrical engineering, to describe stay-at-home measures – akin to a partial lockdown.³⁵ The Ministry of Health also used locally contextual terms, such as ‘local cases residing in dorms’³⁶ – later replaced with ‘dorm residents’³⁷—to classify the spread of COVID-19. To make sense of the dormitory outbreak, individuals must know which stakeholder’s updates would meet their informational needs; the type of text to consume (e.g. media releases or the Ministry of Health’s epidemiological updates); and the informational pattern of updates (i.e. frequency and specificity).

A crucial factor leading to the development of confusing narratives was the lack of a clear and consistent distinction between the stakeholders’ level of perspective when detailing who was impacted by the outbreak and how it impacted on Singaporean residents. The stakeholders presented updates at three perspectives: macro-level (i.e. affected Singapore or its residents), meso-level (i.e. affected a group of residents or a geographical area), and micro-level (i.e. affected individuals). NPOs and the government frequently switched among macro-level, meso-level, and micro-level perspectives; the former doing so when describing the positive impact of their activities and the latter, when justifying the necessity of public health measures. Our analysis showed a heavy use of formal and technical language in government texts, which contrasted with the emotive language of NPO texts that advocated for foreign workers’ rights and in news texts about foreign workers’ living conditions and behaviours. However, the government texts were not devoid of references to foreign workers as a vulnerable community that needed care, which reflected attempts to reduce the anxiety of foreign workers and their families. The formal language and the integration of macro-level and meso-level perspectives in government texts provided jarring accounts when read with NPO texts and news texts, which used meso-level and micro-level perspectives when narrating foreign workers’ hardship and lived experiences.³⁸ There was a pivot to meso-level perspectives in the government’s national addresses, which described Singaporeans labouring over the crisis as the ‘healthcare workers, public officers, grassroots leaders, and volunteers’ who ‘stepped up during this crisis … taking good care of migrant workers in the dorms’.³⁹ Such meso-level perspectives, however, were used to drive home macro-level narratives that celebrated Singapore’s communitarian ideology, as well as cast the pandemic as ‘a public health issue, but also a serious economic, social and political problem’.³⁹

The news texts conveyed the seriousness of the dormitory outbreak and the government’s position that the pandemic was under control. The news texts justified the segregation of the cases in the dormitories from the daily tally of cases in Singapore as ‘defensible … from a public health perspective’, citing experts who held this perspective.⁴⁰ The government was portrayed as acting quickly to quell the outbreak, despite the virus spreading at a greater speed in the dormitories, compared to among the general population.^41,42,43 Some news texts attributed the outbreak to the dormitories’ poor living conditions,⁴⁴ although the government did not apportion significant responsibility to dormitory operators as they were viewed as doing their work ‘professionally and with a clear focus on workers’ well-being’.⁴⁵ Other news texts reiterated the government’s claim that COVID-19’s contagious nature, exacerbated by people living in proximity to each other, was the main cause of the outbreak.⁴⁶ Foreign workers were also portrayed negatively in some news texts. These negative representations focused on foreign workers’ poor personal hygiene and their disregard for the circuit breaker measures.^47,48 This general sentiment on hygiene was carried through news articles that depicted the government’s interventions during the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories, which focused on improving the dormitories’ sanitary conditions.⁴⁹ In this way, the news texts conveyed the government’s macro-level and comprehensive, multi-ministry efforts to resolve the outbreak, while concomitantly using micro-level narratives to highlight the individual responsibility of foreign workers to break the cycle of COVID-19 transmission.

As Singapore entered the circuit-breaker period to curtail the spread of COVID-19, NPOs shared meso-level and micro-level updates that articulated the foreign workers’ everyday realities. Importantly, because the NPO texts sought to achieve different aims (e.g. advocate for change versus provide accountability for donations), they provided contrasting accounts of the foreign workers’ lived experience of the pandemic and circuit breaker measures. Some texts presented meso-level and micro-level updates of the NPOs’ organisational activities, such as stories of appreciation from foreign workers and sharing information on their outreach or fundraising efforts.^50,51,52 Other NPO texts drew attention to the plight of foreign workers and practical ways to help them. Overall, the texts had a mostly positive tone because the NPOs would emphasise the positive outcomes of their outreach and fundraising activities to address the ‘current issues’ affecting foreign workers. Because the NPOs were engaging in activities that were also undertaken pre-pandemic, their texts sometimes created an alternate reality – on social media, at least – that relegated the dormitory outbreak to a secondary concern. Interestingly, our analysis of the NPO texts revealed a propensity to frame the stricter measures limiting foreign workers’ movements and their attendant effects as ‘emerging issues’ that interfered with the NPOs fulfilling their organisational mission to advocate or lobby for foreign workers’ wellbeing and rights, which included improving their living conditions.

Collaborative narratives

The collaborative narratives facilitated dialogue between those managing the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories and those impacted by the outbreak and the measures to curb the outbreak. As Taylor and Kent (2014) note, dialogue is characterised by an orientation toward others and lies on a continuum, from monologic communication to dialogic communication. Our analysis shows the three stakeholders played different roles, and facilitated, to varying degrees, opportunities ‘to make things happen, to help make better decisions, to keep citizens informed, and to strengthen organisations and society’ (Taylor & Kent, 2014, p. 388). Here, the news texts projected Singapore’s coordinated and cohesive efforts at managing the pandemic, regardless of whether such a projection reflects reality. Portrayals of foreign workers were characterised by a duality of ‘the other’ and ‘one of us’. Foreign workers were, at times, depicted as unhygienic, dirty, and by extension to be blamed for the poor living conditions that led to the dormitory outbreak,^53,54 a finding also reflected in Bernhard and Ellemunt’s (2022) analysis. Even though this framing of foreign workers suggested the news texts sought to cast foreign workers as the deviant ‘other’, our findings point to a more diverse interpretation. The news texts also reported on public-private partnerships to alleviate the living conditions in the dormitories and gave broad coverage to the government’s efforts to look after foreign workers in collaboration with local NPOs.^55,56,57 Unsurprisingly, the news texts echoed the government’s overarching mantra of inclusivity and multi-sectorial approach to helping foreign workers, which encompassed Singaporeans being willing to pay more for essential services and essential workers, such as cleaners.⁵⁸

Our analysis showed that some NPOs – for example, TWC2 and HOME, as opposed to HealthServe and Migrant Workers Centre – were more outspoken and critical of the stricter COVID-19 measures imposed on foreign workers during and post-circuit breaker.⁵⁹ However, as a whole, the NPO texts were a rallying call for residents to view foreign workers as individuals with value beyond their status as foreign workers and essential workers for Singapore’s economy. The NPOs created opportunities for residents to help and interact with foreign workers through participating in volunteering initiatives and by involving them in online dialogues about foreign workers.^60,61 The NPO texts were aimed at influencing public opinion and securing public will for policy change, doing so in two ways. First, the NPO texts drew the public’s attention to the responsibility of the government and companies (e.g. employers and dormitory operators) to protect and actuate foreign workers’ wellbeing and rights. They recognised that regulatory and policy changes were pivotal in enshrining and advancing the rights of foreign workers. Second, in the NPO texts, the dormitory outbreak and the subsequent movement control measures for foreign workers were utilised as opportunities for advocacy and lobbying to ‘build the political will to leverage policy change’ (Reid, 2000, p. 4).

Collaborative narratives were also explicit in government texts during the dormitory outbreak and, arguably, since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The texts emphasised the ‘multi-layered approach’ used in the detection, support, care, and isolation of migrant workers during the dormitory outbreak. These texts also highlighted inter-agency partnerships among the ministries of health, manpower, and home affairs and their administrative agencies, with recurring mentions of working with ‘dormitory operators and partners’.^62,63 Of note was the use of government texts to carry messages to both Chinese and Bangladeshi citizens working in Singapore during the dormitory outbreak.^64,65 In the government texts, there were frequent emphases on pledges of support from internal stakeholders to respond as ‘one civil service’ to combat issues arising from the pandemic, such as the dormitory outbreak and leveraging technology to monitor foreign workers’ movements.^66,67 This ‘whole-of-government’ approach forms Singapore’s public policy approach to state planning and responding to national emergencies (Zainal, 2011). Messaging in the government texts dovetailed whole-of-government with whole-of-society narratives during the initial phase of managing the dormitory outbreak. Singaporeans working together was equated to giving ‘trust’ and ’support’ to the government.⁶⁸ The Singaporean government’s facilitation of dialogue was predicated on coordinating the efforts of public service institutions and focused on communicating that it took active steps to protect residents in Singapore and their livelihoods. Foreign workers were framed as (labour) participants in Singapore’s nation-building and stakeholders whose wellbeing were looked after by public service institutions and the Singaporean society at large (see Lee, 2020). Here, foreign workers and the issues affecting them became a means for the Singaporean government to initiate dialogue and articulate its rationale for stringent public health measures, justifying its ‘stronger national push to decisively break the transmissions’ to make ‘the most of [the] circuit breaker period’.⁶⁹

Chaotic narrative spaces’ during a public health crisis

Our findings on the narratives constructed by the Singaporean government, local NPOs, and local news media show how these stakeholders navigated chaotic narrative spaces during the dormitory outbreak between March and August 2020. The three narratives we identified are manifestations of the chaotic communication arising from the emergence of chaotic narrative spaces. In our paper’s context, narrative spaces are physical, digital, and virtual spaces imbued with communicative potential. Narrative spaces can turn chaotic when social, political, and organisational actors move across permeable domains of government and governance to influence developments in each domain and to influence responses to an issue that affects a country, an organisation, or a group of people (see Carroll, 2013, pp. 166–168 for a discussion on the emergence of coherent order and devolution of order). In Singapore’s case, these domains related to the porous ‘spaces’ of policy and regulation, health and economics, and social and (digital) public spheres within Singapore’s rule-based, rational bureaucracy (Chua, 1995) and the precarity of foreign workers’ lives and labour (Yeoh, Wee, & Lam, 2022). As Dutta and Rahman (2023, p. 195) argue, Singapore’s ‘extractive economy is reproduced by communicative inequality, inequality in the distribution of communicative resources’. Foreign workers in Singapore have a long history of social marginalisation, which is further complicated by the government’s migration policy (Goh, 2019) which treats foreign workers as ‘low-cost, hyper-productive, docile, and disposable’ (Yeoh, Wee, & Lam, 2022, p. xxii).⁷⁰

In our study, the contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives exemplified the dynamic chaotic narrative spaces that social, political, and organisational actors work within. In public relations literature, an issue is ‘a condition or event, either internal or external to the organisation which, if it continues, will have a significant effect on the functioning or performance of the organisation or its future interests’ (Regester & Larkin, 2002, as cited in Jaques, 2007, p. 147). Based on our findings, the three stakeholders appeared to perceive and identify different problems as issues (whether potential, emerging, or current) and different issues as crises. The three narratives also captured the stakeholders’ responses (e.g. public health measures) and communication activities (e.g. daily media conferences) to prevent issues from developing into crises. From another perspective, the emergence of chaotic narrative spaces point to contestations about the issues the three stakeholders and other social, political, and organisational actors consider strategically significant (c.f. Zerfass, Verčič, Nothhaft, & Werder, 2018). The COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories underlined how chaotic narrative spaces can emerge when stakeholders identify different problems as issues and prioritise different issues to remedy. For example, the NPO texts characterised the dormitory outbreak simultaneously as a public health crisis and a crisis of management failure (Lerbinger, 2011). The dormitories’ living conditions and the foreign workers’ prolonged confinement were represented as ‘current issues’ that can deepen the public health crisis and management crisis and bring forth ‘emerging issues’. The local NPOs engaged in government-centred and society-centred advocacy to build ‘the political will to leverage policy change’ (Reid, 2000, p. 4). They also engaged in what Weiler and Brändli (2015) describe as outside lobbying, which involved going public and putting pressure on policymakers. In contrast, in government texts, the dormitory outbreak was portrayed as a current public health issue, not a crisis of management. Narratives of the local news media effectively became the binding agent that steered public discourse towards a merging position where the government’s efforts at managing the dormitory outbreaks became central to the collaborative efforts across Singaporean society to respond to the pandemic. An ethnographic study of what Singaporeans value about journalism reveals a preference for collaborative discourses that are supportive of and not adversarial towards the government (Tandoc & Duffy, 2016). The desire to depict social cohesion in a community is an established practice in journalism (Kim, Lowrey, Buzzelli, & Heath, 2020; Leupold, Klinger, & Jarren, 2016). In the chaotic situation that is the pandemic, the local news media gravitated towards establishing an equilibrium between the authorities managing the dormitory outbreak and the foreign workers subjected to strict movement restrictions.⁷¹

Singapore’s efficient use of digital bureaucracy is evident during the dormitory outbreak and throughout the pandemic (see GovTech Singapore, n.d.). Relative to other countries, there is high public trust in Singapore, and the Singaporean government is perceived as ethical and competent (Edelman, 2020). This environment of trust enabled the government to reinforce its communitarian ideology, which pairs meritocracy with collectivism and social compact with diversity and resilience (Chua, 1995). This communitarian ideology also extends to the governance of workers in the marine and construction sectors, which make up most of the low-skilled foreign workers employed in Singapore and who resided in dormitories during the COVID-19 outbreak. Texts highlighting the individuals who mobilised resources or managed the dormitory outbreak were used to showcase public spiritedness. Stakeholders used these displays of public-people partnerships to engage with their publics and other stakeholders, creating three tiers of engagement that corresponded to the building of low-level, mid-level, and high-level relationships (see Johnston & Taylor, 2022). All three stakeholders disseminated information and interacted with their publics to effect individual-level cognitive, affective, and behavioural actions (tier one of engagement), for instance, using contact tracing applications and adhering to public health measures. At the organisational level, the stakeholders increased engagements among their publics and the broader Singaporean society, including foreign workers (tier two of engagement). The three narratives illuminated how stakeholders conceptualised their role and responsibility ‘to mobilize others, and to foster a sense of belonging’ (Riessman, 2008, p. 9), using stories to ‘tell themselves and others about who [they] are (and who they are not)’ (Riessman, 2008, p. 8). Of the three stakeholders, local NPOs were observed to form high-level relationships with their publics. They created sustained interpersonal engagements and provided opportunities to create socially shared meanings of how foreign workers ‘fit’ into Singapore (tier three of engagement). In contrast, the Singaporean government and local news media’s process of engaging with their publics appeared more episodic than relational. Their narratives were also not aimed at creating social change or enabling the participation of silent and disempowered groups (Johnston & Taylor, 2022), such as the foreign workers whose dormitories were gazetted as isolation areas and who were subjected to movement restrictions until June 2022 (Government of Singapore, 2022).⁷²

While the COVID-19 pandemic is chaotic in that it created unprecedented challenges, it does not mean that stakeholders’ communication activities would by default result in chaotic communication. Chaotic communication is an outcome brought about when communicators identify and allocate resources to issues perceived as potential, emerging, current, crisis, or dormant (Zyglidopoulos, 2003) and when they target or prioritise certain audiences, key publics, and stakeholders (Coombs & Holladay, 2014; Kenix & Bolanos Lopez, 2022). What is clear, however, is that COVID-19 can exacerbate the conditions that create chaotic narrative spaces by revealing societal, cultural, and socio-economic fault lines, as well as widening health and economic disparities (see Amir, 2020; Kawachi, 2020). There was a concerted effort by the stakeholders to recognise foreign workers’ essential and economic role in Singapore’s nation-building. Importantly, the contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives downplayed perceptions that these low-wage foreign workers’ jobs were undesirable and temporary (Dutta, 2021; Yeoh, Wee, & Lam, 2022). Our analysis of the three narratives extends Chua’s (1995) analysis of how pragmatism is a type of neoliberal and economic rationality based on adopting rules and norms that require speedy compliance in times of chaos. Our research also points to a weakness in Singapore’s bureaucratic and rules-based nature of communication, which does not allow for effective integrations of grassroots voices and engagements in dialogic communication. In focusing on communication practices as endemic to the Singapore government’s rules-based and bureaucratic approach to governance, we draw attention to the factors that shape stakeholder narratives during a crisis, for example, the tiers of engagement with publics, the prioritisation of issues, and the changing relations among stakeholders as issues mature or develop into a crisis.⁷³

The outbreak of COVID-19 in foreign-worker dormitories presented an immense crisis and opportunity for Singapore, both internally to Singapore residents and externally to international observers evaluating what was then-believed to be an astute management of the pandemic. In relation to the Singaporean government, local NPOs, and local news media, the contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives revealed the order and chaos of ‘fitting’ foreign workers into the porous ‘spaces’ of policy and regulatory, health and economic, and social and public spheres. Our evaluation of the stakeholders’ chaotic communication, which occurred within chaotic narrative spaces, showed that the crisis became intensified when stakeholders moved quickly between narrative spaces and among the permeable domains, giving rise to a disjointed master narrative of Singapore’s pandemic experience and the foreign workers’ lived experiences of COVID-19. This disjointed master narrative was encapsulated by the contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives that we identified from analysing government texts, NPO texts, and news texts. Each narrative signalled different expectations of government-society relations in relation to the involvement of citizens, NPOs, and companies in shaping the government’s policymaking and response to issues deemed strategically significant to social, political, and organisational actors. Foreign workers became implicated in these narratives, which framed the dormitory outbreak as a policy, public health, and economic issue to be addressed and as avenues for advocacy, lobbying, and philanthropic engagement.

In our paper, we undertook a qualitative analysis of stakeholder texts and conceptualised chaotic narrative spaces as a communicative space in which contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives were created and circulated. Due to the extensive texts generated by the three stakeholders, we focused our analysis on the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories between March and August 2020. Future research can build on our framework of chaotic narrative spaces and apply it to study other crisis communication and public communication, including tangential areas of health communication and science communication. Our framework offers a means for researchers to consider the role and influence of particular social, political, and organisational actors in bringing about chaotic communication and how these actors move among permeable domains of government and governance to shape developments within these domains and influence responses to a problem, issue, or crisis.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The texts analysed included HealthServe’s website (https://www.healthserve.org.sg), 61 Instagram posts (https://www.instagram.com/healthservesg), and 216 Facebook posts (https://www.facebook.com/healthservesg).

2. The texts analysed included Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics’ website (https://www.home.org.sg), 43 Instagram posts (https://www.instagram.com/home.migrants.sg), and 104 Facebook posts (https://www.facebook.com/home.migrants.sg).

3. The texts analysed included ItsRainingRaincoats’ website (https://itsrainingraincoats.com), 175 Instagram posts (https://www.instagram.com/itsrainingraincoats), and 295 Facebook posts (https://www.facebook.com/itsrainingraincoats).

4. The texts analysed included Migrant Workers’ Centre’s website (https://www.mwc.org.sg), 28 Instagram posts (https://www.instagram.com/mwcsg), and 110 Facebook posts https://www.facebook.com/mwcsg.

5. The texts analysed included Transient Workers Count Too’s website (https://twc2.org.sg), 6 Instagram posts (https://www.instagram.com/twc2sg), and 59 Facebook posts (https://www.facebook.com/twc2sg).

6. The texts analysed included the content published on the Singaporean government’s official online communication platform (https://www.gov.sg/), such as media releases and speeches by key ministerial and senior officials managing the dormitory outbreak.

7. The texts analysed included media releases published by the Prime Minister’s Office (https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom).

8. The texts analysed included the sixth issue of Ethos (https://knowledge.csc.gov.sg/digital-issue-06/editorial), an online publication by the Civil Service College, the training arm of Singapore’s civil service sector.

9. The texts analysed included 37 media releases from the Ministry of Health (https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights), 46 media releases from the Ministry of Manpower (https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases), 5 media releases from the Prime Minister’s Office (https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom) and 7 media releases from the Ministry of Home Affairs (https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom).

10. The sample of 209 news articles included 99 news articles from The Straits Times, 11 news articles from Channel News Asia, 46 news articles from TODAY, and 53 news articles from Mothership. The sample does not represent all news articles about the dormitory outbreak, as there were broken links, and the researchers could not access those news articles.

11. https://www.facebook.com/twc2sg/posts/pfbid02GiG26ZL7HWQArczohE6P7vpM8A7bYWDiJ1ApZerbmP8dCmYGGSPgB5qXSQTFUKuLl

12. https://www.facebook.com/twc2sg/posts/pfbid0rFHwKJ4NyvvghibBE1YssLMgHWnAsQpH7xcih7FVnWA7QUdrSnA3xvRsuSfamKp2l

13. https://www.facebook.com/twc2sg/posts/pfbid02vEGgUiRZ3sSutYKhvsp6d96Zaf9KNKeQETBDiPaovUCJR28f8eRSgsovXRDPKXFml

14. https://mothership.sg/2020/04/workers-locked-twc2-operator-warned/

15. https://www.mom.gov.sg/eservices/fwmomcare

16. https://www.gov.sg/article/pm-lees-address-on-the-covid-19-situation-in-singapore-10-april-2020

17. https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2020/0411-food-distribution-cleanliness-and-hygiene-standards-at-stl-and-td-stabilised-within-48-hours

18. https://www.facebook.com/mwcsg/posts/pfbid0XCC2vurpaBW9uruYAFvp8xtXubD1Kb8iG8kb5bk5KFwFvDPVNSW2orqe5ZGPzi6Kl

19. https://www.instagram.com/p/CC-2DH2H-f0/

20. https://www.instagram.com/p/CCKckKvlKAi/

21. https://fb.watch/nelSXRe1ed/

22. https://www.facebook.com/mwcsg/posts/pfbid028siqeESuLXH1vKFYAFYL84bJFUpGibBUKo18JTGj6pZ8uw52oT7mExn9PtfZFVkPl

23. https://www.facebook.com/twc2sg/posts/pfbid09M8q4o4hUHDCpunRQ2xk73aFQnkzK8RMyu9hJnMAAFUUwFJjGxaMDYVN6NqzdQQ1l

24. https://www.instagram.com/p/CB2c_rLFd_R/

25. https://www.facebook.com/mwcsg/posts/pfbid02nheMg6bb2w3GU9DurwqDMKSsmN2QiutHqATNsJT7nutJ2yfnGtgNpjjNFWUvceS9l

26. https://www.facebook.com/healthservesg/posts/pfbid0Z5jFKRVsZtj7rjTbdMZwjMM92V4T6mLx1eic6XjQnDYxB6hhaDPNXbkLZKm5fvevl

27. https://twc2.org.sg/2020/07/13/water-water-every-where-but-three-cups-a-day-to-drink/

28. https://www.home.org.sg/statements/2020/6/26/response-to-post-circuitbreaker-amendments-to-the-employment-of-foreign-manpower-work-passes-regulations-home-amp-twc2nbsp

29. https://www.todayonline.com/big-read/migrant-worker-housing-spore-how-we-got-here

30. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/campaign-to-make-workers-feel-welcome-in-housing-estates

31. https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/heroes-unmasked-translation-initiatives-pop-bridge-communication-gap-migrant-workers-amid

32. https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/16-more-cases-discharged-65-new-cases-of-covid-19-infection-confirmed

33. https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/two-more-cases-discharged-four-new-cases-of-covid-19-infection-confirmed

34. https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/two-more-cases-discharged-four-new-cases-of-covid-19-infection-confirmed

35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2_Z2RDm_ag

36. https://www.moh.gov.sg/docs/librariesprovider5/local-situation-report/situation-report—09-apr-2020-(amended).pdf

37. https://www.moh.gov.sg/docs/librariesprovider5/default-document-library/20200416_daily_report_on_covid-19_cab-(2250h).pdf

38. https://twc2.org.sg/2020/04/27/covid-19-tales-from-the-ground-part-1/

39. https://www.gov.sg/article/pm-lee-hsien-loong-overcoming-the-crisis-of-a-generation

40. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/structural-and-mindset-changes-needed-to-improve-wages-and-living-conditions-of-foreign

41. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/1037-new-coronavirus-cases-bringing-singapores-total-to-11178

42. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/record-287-new-covid-19-cases-in-spore-links-found-between-mustafa-centre-and-clusters-in

43. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/coronavirus-record-120-new-covid-19-cases-in-spore-two-foreign-worker-dormitories-gazetted

44. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/manpower/workers-describe-crowded-cramped-living-conditions

45. https://www.straitstimes.com/politics/parliament-getting-covid-19-recovery-right-at-foreign-worker-dorms-will-be-an-enormous

46. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/conditions-in-dorms-not-main-reason-for-clusters-says-tan-chuan-jin

47. https://mothership.sg/2020/04/migrant-workers-zaobao-letter/ https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/manpower/coronavirus-work-pass-holder-banned-from-working-in-spore-39-foreign-workers

48. https://mothership.sg/2020/04/migrant-workers-zaobao-letter/

49. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/coronavirus-ngos-step-in-to-help-migrant-workers-at-smaller-housing-facilities

50. https://www.facebook.com/home.migrants.sg/posts/pfbid02jjXgNh8mvYWukVvrBV8JmeEdTy1Z4Qc5vBTQkQxkHLeSXGC7be4evAX4b5tJJA7Dl

51. https://www.instagram.com/p/CARS_rWHQZy/

52. https://www.facebook.com/twc2sg/posts/pfbid0GsyaHU1CwugJVJjdtK6M1WL3TtSW96xbsqV5CAmzGroXUvBwGa98Ec18jUBCHBgcl

53. https://mothership.sg/2020/04/migrant-worker-dorms-lockdown-unsafe

54. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/letter-on-dorm-cases-xenophobic-shanmugam

55. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/foreign-workers-who-recovered-from-covid-19-moved-into-superstar-gemini-cruise-ship

56. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/we-will-look-after-you-ministry-assures-foreign-workers

57. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/all-hands-on-deck-needed-to-improve-low-wage-workers-lot

58. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/manpower/8-in-10-singaporeans-willing-to-pay-more-for-essential-services

59. https://twc2.org.sg/2020/04/26/joyless-joylicious-part-1/

60. https://www.instagram.com/p/B-yjPJMHQby/

61. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_zmwovlVwc/

62. https://www.mha.gov.sg/docs/hta_libraries/publications/02-service-in-the-time-of-covid-19.pdf

63. https://www.mha.gov.sg/home-team-news/story/detail/on-the-frontline-with-fast/

64. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXjBW67-IFc&t=20s

65. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imlsmRJX2vQ

66. https://www.moh.gov.sg/docs/librariesprovider5/default-document-library/multi-ministry-taskforce-on-wuhan-coronavirus-and-tor—final.pdf

67. https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2020/0530-preparing-for-safe-working-safe-living-and-safe-rest-days

68. https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/PM-Lee-Hsien-Loong-address-COVID-19-21-Apr

69. https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/strong-national-push-to-stem-spread-of-covid-19

70. It is worth noting that the ‘digital first’ approach by The Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia, the two main media conglomerates, meant that news articles published by their flagship brands are often adapted for other publications.

71. One of the migrant workers who was confined subsequently filed a lawsuit against his former employer and the dormitory operator. (N. Chua, 2020).

72. Two mid-sized cruise ships owned by Genting Cruise Lines were used as temporary accommodations for migrant workers who had recovered from COVID-19, which was part of the Singaporean government’s strategy to reduce both the density of dormitories and the coronavirus clusters forming in dormitories. (Maritime & Port Authority of Singapore, 2021)

73. It is worth noting that the ‘digital first’ approach by The Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia, the two main media conglomerates, meant that news articles published by their flagship brands are often adapted for other publications.