Collaboration, reinvented tools and specialist knowledge : Communication professionals’ experiences of global health crisis management

• Communication professionals have a paramount role in global crisis. What did they learn during the covid pandemic that could be used in future global crisis? The aim of this article is to identify and analyze strategy changes among communicators in municipalities and how their conceptions of communicated knowledge transformed during the pandemic. Retrospective interviews and textual material are analyzed with a framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis in combination with Legitimation Code Theory. The analysis shows that the work of the communicators was characterized by collaboration with other professional groups and the civil society, and that the complexity and important time aspects during this crisis gave birth to semi-new, reinvented, discursive tools in the shape of text genres. The communicators’ conceived relevant knowledge as concept-driven and developed the conception that conveyance of knowledge should be thoroughly planned in a way that takes complexity into account.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

knowledge objects

communication professionals

legitimation

complexity

time

communication tools

linguistic codes

discourse

nexus analysis

mediated discourse analysis

Retorik

Rhetoric

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)