Abstract
While the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 was no longer regarded as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on May 5, 2023, there have been increasing academic debates on COVID-19 since it broke out in 2019. Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty: Studies of Social Phenomena and Social Theory Across 6 Continents illustrates the multiple dimensions of the response to COVID-19 in terms of institutional and governance policies, and the meaning and actions of individual citizens in their daily lives, it brings a variety of studies from six continents to capture how states, societies, groups, and individuals were experiencing and facing an uncertain pandemic, providing a unique topic within the wider field of critical research on risk and uncertainty.
The book consists of 12 chapters in three parts. The opening chapter outlines the key themes of the book and locates it from a broader sociological perspective. Focusing on and dialogue with Mary Douglas’s work (Douglas, 1990), Brown and Zinn aim to establish a widely global sociology of risk and uncertainty, emphasizing the value of those insights from the empirical examples and theoretical perspectives of southern countries.
Regulations and protective measures for COVID-19 vary from country to country. Part I ‘Governing COVID-19’ (Chapters 2–5) explores the governing and response to COVID-19 in India, Brazil, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As Kritika Maheshwari discusses, during the time of initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, since the public health emergency legislation authorized the implementation of emergency risk control measures, some Indians worried that the government might arbitrarily exercise special powers and entailed risking the domination of citizens (Chapter 2). Concentrating on the banking sector in Brazil, Fernanda Sousa-Duarte explores how the discourses on the risks of telework have changed in response to changing perceptions of workers’ vulnerability, and argues the qualitative analysis of secondary data, news, and reports on telework in the banking sector is helpful to understand the sociocultural construction of employment vulnerability and risks (Chapter 3). Following Sousa-Duarte, Melina Tobías and Soledad Fernández Bouzo argue the most vulnerable social sectors are the lowest-income households which have few resources to cope with risks in Buenos Aires, the lockdown had important social impacts on poor communities, and the measures of lockdowns should be addressed to avoid exacerbating social inequality (Chapter 4). In China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as Henry Rothstein et al. point out, the measures and controls of COVID-19 are also influenced by traditions, traditions shaped the response to COVID-19 through August 2020, the unique governance traditions of four countries, such as norms of state intervention, state structures, and differences in policy-making styles, had an important impact on their responses and regulations (Chapter 5).
Risk is ubiquitous in modern society, and any damage or losses can be seen primarily as a product of human action and social dynamics. Part II ‘Communicating and Interpreting COVID-19 Risk’ (Chapters 6–9) sheds light on the risk, fear, control, and uncertainty of COVID-19 in Sweden, South Australia, Argentina, and Chile. While most European countries experienced periods of full lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden’s strategy emphasized individual responsibility. Focusing on everyday life, Linda Kvarnlöf delves into how citizens in Stockholm adjusted and made sense of daily life in accordance with the recommendations and restrictions of the government, but they sometimes found the soft governance hard to transform into practice (Chapter 6). While Jessica Thomas and Kristen Foley’s findings of South Australia show that some 40 middle-aged women experienced the fear and uncertainty of COVID-19 in their lives, the perceived uncertainty around COVID-19 required women to search for control within the realm of control available to them, and women were doing their best to prevent themselves from falling into uncertainty and to increase certainty and control in the current and future waves of the pandemic (Chapter 7). Compared with Jessica Thomas and Kristen Foley, Brenda Focás and Esteban Zunino conduct research on Argentina. After the Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation was enacted on 20 March 2020, the information regarding COVID-19 in principle digital media channels, the composition of news themes, and the most COVID-19 relevant news in dominant digital newspapers played a crucial role in whether increase or decrease the perception of risk (Chapter 8). While in Chile, the decision-making was more complicated in practice due to the challenges and limitations of risk colonization during the COVID-19 pandemic, Magdalena Gil and Eduardo A Undurraga assert that quantification challenges and model uncertainty were not easy to comprehend for the public and policymakers (Chapter 9).
Although Beck’s claim about the declining importance of the state fails to capture existing shifts, his study on how global risks overwhelm existing forms of social and economic protection can empower the state toward post-mortem and intervention (Beck, 2002). Part III ‘Pandemic Risk: Emerging Conceptual and Methodological Issues’ (Chapters 10–12) delves into the emerging conceptual, ethical, and methodological issues of pandemic risk, critically engages with Beck’s theory (Beck, 2002), and analyzes how the pandemic caused previous assumptions across boundaries of space and time to become a question and reflects on important similarities and relationships with longer-standing environmental concerns. Dean Curran and Adam Standring argue that COVID-19 demonstrates the increasingly global character of risk in Baker’s theory of world risk society, it has forced humans to re-evaluate their relationships with the environment and institutionalized social practices, and it shows that the lockdowns and vaccines are insufficient when meeting the threat posed by environmental breakdown (Chapters 10 and 11). Different from the above perspective, Claudia Mitchell and his collaborators draw on ethics in the context of risk. In South Africa, there were negative impacts of physical distance and social isolation on women experiencing sexual violence in the family and community, women also faced social, economic, spatial, and cultural risks by lockdowns during COVID-19 in rural contexts (Chapter 12).
In summary, the book looks at COVID-19 from a global and governance perspective, providing a rich, varied, and textured picture of the world faces and responds to COVID-19. It is helpful for scholars and students to understand the responses of countries, organizations, and individuals to social phenomena emerging during the coronavirus pandemic. However, the authors call for moving forward, but readers might look forward to more specific measures of how to do so. Nevertheless, this slight regret does not detract from the book’s value of theory and practice, it presents a reference that can open our eyes to study and address risk and uncertainty by focusing on COVID-19.