The spring ‘stay at home’ coronavirus campaign communicated by pending accounts

Abstract

The UK government instruction to stay at home exemplifies how governments do things by saying things in a crisis. The force of the government slogan was amplified by its intertextual circulation in wider public discourse to produce an alignment between the duty of government to protect citizens, the spiritual mission of the Church and the public information role of the press. By analysing the rhetorical and sequential structure of promotional discourse with recourse to speech act, narrative and routine theory, we show how its authors concurrently use cognitive and empathetic interpellations to induce subjectivation, configuring pending accounts which not only involve recipients in scripts for restoring order (if … then … programming constructions) but also implicate them in restorative storylines (just as there and then … so here and now … mimetic constructions). The result is to overlay on the official inducement new voices of hope, conditioned by participation in a collaborative community, naturalising compliance.