Institutional Policy and Cultural Repertoires of Compliance During Covid-19 in Tel Aviv and New Orleans’ Cultural and Creative Industries

Cultural repertoires are tools for action, both preceding practices and shaping imaginings of their outcomes. This article introduces “cultural repertoires of compliance” as an analytic lens into the ways culture schematizes and scripts compliant actions. This approach is an alternative to others that attribute compliance to the effectiveness of a governance regime. Such explanations were common during the Covid-19 pandemic, when workers faced an ever-changing and rapid succession of workplace policies. Yet workers also had their own explanations for what they did during the pandemic and why. Their cultural repertoires of compliance established the norms for compliant work behaviors and justified the range of acceptable deviations. While such repertoires are always latent, the disruption of Covid made their deployment manifest and open to recombination as workers improvised responses to shifting policies. An analysis of comparative interview data from over 130 workers in the culinary arts and film and television industries in Tel Aviv, Israel and New Orleans, USA, who reflected on their workplace experiences during 2020–2021, reveals that, despite opposing governance approaches in the two countries, workers drew on justificatory scripts drawn from national-cultural traditions, sectoral subcultures, and transnational production hierarchies. Nevertheless, the construction of compliance in these cases exhibited as much a retrenchment into old cultural scripts as an embrace of new ones. The article asks whether the cultural repertoires mobilized during the pandemic opened new possibilities for collective action, and it reflects on the broader utility of the concept for rethinking compliance beyond the Covid context.