The language we use to talk about crime in the labor market is changing. In the last decadeʼs public debates and political documents, we see a large increase in the use of terms such as «labor crime», «labor market crime», «work environment crime» and the abbreviated form «A-crime» as synonyms to describe new forms of crime and crime fighting. The article presents an exploratory study of the linguistic change and links it to the emergence of a new framework for understanding crime in working life. We analyze data sets consisting of media texts and national governing documents and identify major linguistic changes. The new conceptual apparatus is described as successful in that it is used to achieve broad political support, across traditional divides, both political and organizational. Methodologically, the article is based on corpus-assisted discourse analysis, where keywords are used as an analytical focal point for qualitative and quantitative analyses of the material, to identify developments in the field. The article argues that an analysis of the concept of ʼwork-related crimeʼ is useful for understanding policy development in the field, and that the underlying understanding of the threat has worked to unify across the Norwegian political elite.
vol.6, utg.5
