“Do your part: Stay apart”: Collective intentionality and collective (in)action in US governor's COVID-19 press conferences

The “Waves:” Conceptualizing Covid-19 as an event through one (particularly) contested metaphor

“…Alexander and Smith (2020: 264) observe, “The first few weeks and months [of the pandemic] were a remarkable demonstration of a societal capacity for highspeed bricolage as familiar structures of meanings (narrative, iconography, genre, binary codes) and meaningful practices (collective rituals, interaction rituals, and performances) were bolted and glued together in new ways.” I show that a pandemic composed of multiple cascading “waves” was one such narrative that was selectively performed (or not performed) to “shape… reality in turn” (ibid ) — and to be shaped by reality in turn. 16 For Democratic governors, the “wave” metaphor became a sort of rallying cry for an ideological stance that emphasizes the importance of collective action ( Kirgil & Voyer, 2022 ), expresses strong trust in science ( Hamilton & Safford, 2021 ) and government institutions ( Shepherd et al, 2020 ) and stresses the need to protect the “vulnerable” ( Perry et al, 2021 ). Conversely, for Republican governors, the “wave” metaphor directly threatened an ideological stance that emphasizes the importance of work ( Kirgil & Voyer, 2022 ), expresses little trust in science ( Hamilton & Safford, 2021 ) and government institutions ( Shepherd et al, 2020 ) and stresses the need to protect the economy and individual liberty ( Perry et al, 2021 ).…”

“…4 Yet, whereas the authors mentioned above merely hint at potential differences in its usage across party lines, I take the “wave” metaphor's political contestation as my central object of study. Given the rich body of sociological research that shows ideological liberals as perceiving more risk of contracting Covid than ideological conservatives ( Shepherd et al, 2020 ), liberal states as being more amenable to public health recommendations than conservative states ( Hill et al, 2021 ), and Democratic governors as more likely to treat recommendations as a “call to action” than Republican governors ( Kirgil & Voyer, 2022 ), I expect Democratic governors to follow Fauci ( Lovelace Jr., 2020 ) in taking up the “wave” metaphor and Republican governors to follow Pence in rejecting it.…”

Mobilizing Conceptual Spaces: How Word Embedding Models Can Inform Measurement and Theory Within Organization Science

“…In our example, patented innovation is well represented by the patents corpus, so we show below how to train the conceptual space representation from scratch and what conceptual connections it reveals. Other examples of contexts where researchers might train a corpus from scratch include online communities (Burtch et al 2021, academic disciplines (Hofstra et al 2020, Lin et al 2022, labor markets (Bana 2022), public records (Arseniev-Koehler et al 2022), product and firm descriptions (Guzman and Li 2023), and earnings calls and public speeches (Kirgil and Voyer 2022).…”

“…In other work, researchers have mobilized this approach to measure the collective intentionality (people's ability to engage in collective reasoning and action) of political leaders and compare how republican and democrat leaders differently mobilize it (Kirgil and Voyer 2022). They measured collective intentionality by creating a composite list of plural pronouns (we, our), plural constants (state-names) and plural nouns (people).…”

Assembling the Crisis of COVID-19 in Australia: A Foucauldian Analysis of Prime Ministerial Press Conferences in March 2020

“…The press conferences often included the presentation of visual information tracking the spread of the virus and gave details about various actions that governments had taken or planned to implement (Allen et al 2023). The use of press conferences during the health crisis has been explored from a variety of perspectives, including crisis communication (He et al 2023), genre analysis (Wang and Ge 2022), collective intentionality (Kirgil and Voyer 2022) and speech acts (Schueler and Marx 2023). This research provides important insights into the role of press conferences.…”