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SPXXXX10.1177/07311214211039303Sociological PerspectivesDavis et al.

Editorial
Sociological Perspectives

Introduction to the Special Issue

2021, Vol. 64(5) 683­–688
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
on Coronavirus (COVID-19) sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/07311214211039303
https://doi.org/10.1177/07311214211039303
& Society journals.sagepub.com/home/spx

An Exceptional Time
Since emerging in late December 2019, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has contributed
to over 4.5 million deaths worldwide, and many more “long-haulers” have been left to endure a
range of long-term side effects. While impacts on health have been devastating, the COVID-19
pandemic has metastasized through entire societies and nearly every aspect of social life. Indeed,
the pandemic has mobilized and changed governments and political parties, economies, public
health, medicine, militaries, religions, the media, families, and individuals. While some of these
efforts and changes have worked to curtail the pandemic, others have served to prolong the mis-
ery and suffering. As we have witnessed the erosion of democratic institutions, the expansion of
social inequalities, and the further disintegration of societies, it is unclear whether we will ever
really “return to brunch.” One fact is certain. Although medicine and public health are uniquely
equipped to address the biological and behavioral aspects of the coronavirus, they are far less
suited to contribute to our understanding of the enduring social, cultural, institutional, and struc-
tural ramifications of the pandemic. To be sure, these broader questions of society and social life
will require years of sociological analysis.
To this point, comparatively little work in sociology journals has been devoted to the COVID-
19 pandemic. As of late March 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) has cataloged over
234,000 pieces of scientific research through its “global literature on the coronavirus disease”
database (https://search.bvsalud.org/global-literature-on-novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov/). While
fields like medicine and public health have already written extensively on the pandemic, socio-
logical research has clearly lagged behind. According to the WHO database, only 138 pieces of
relevant research appear in the top 50 sociology journals by impact factor or the top 20 sociology
journals per Google Scholar metrics.
Now that we are just beginning to comprehend the myriad social consequences of the COVID-
19 pandemic, we expect to see exponential growth in sociological research. But this should come
as no surprise. The field of sociology emerged during the crises brought on by industrialization
in the late nineteenth century to provide unique insights into a crucial moment of a shifting social
order. The COVID-19 pandemic is merely the latest moment to apply a sociological lens to the
world in flux. With this in mind, Sociological Perspectives agreed to publish the seminal special
issue entirely devoted to original sociological research on the coronavirus (COVID-19) & soci-
ety. In the section that follows, we describe the major contributions of each article in the issue,
organized by theme.

Contributions to the Special Issue

We organize the following by what we see as thematic similarities among the contributions to this
special issue. Three articles are grouped as theoretical extensions because they make efforts to
build theory based on the realities of the pandemic. Two articles analyze various dimensions of
the pandemic media and discursive environments shaped by the pandemic. Three articles explore
the structural conditions of pandemic risk. Three articles broadly relate to pandemic labor pro-
cesses. Three articles focus on how the pandemic has shaped pandemic lifestyles. Finally, two
articles focus on organizational and institutional responses to the pandemic.
684 Sociological Perspectives 64(5)

Theoretical Extensions
Three papers employ overarching theoretical analyses to make sense of several emerging con-
flicts created or made more salient by the pandemic. These papers represent theoretical exten-
sions because they introduce readers to concepts that are generally relevant to the field of
sociology.
Brittany Friedman (2021) focuses on a major hotspot for COVID-19 to build a critical race
theory of prison order. The author combines insights from penal sociology and the sociology of
disaster. In prison, people die by institutional design. Classified as “detainees, inmates, or prison-
ers,” they “die socially, psychically, and physically.” Nothing like solitary confinement embodies
the social and psychic deaths, where confined people are “like ghosts who can still speak and act
but whose speech and actions no longer make an impact on the world.” Friedman argues that “our
longstanding bipartisan commitment to prisons” from a social, political, and economic stand-
point makes “promoting institutional survival rather than human survival” inevitable. When a
disaster like COVID-19 strikes, prisons manage uncertainty by “implementing strategies that
magnify the death(s) of incarcerated people in exchange for the life of the institution.” Prisons,
“hesitant to jeopardize their physical control over incarcerated populations,” dismissed CDC
recommendations and became the epicenter of the pandemic. In September 2020, the top 10
COVID-19 clusters in the United States were identified in prisons.
Mauro Basaure, Alfredo Joignant, and Aldo Mascareño (2021) start by recognizing that the
stringent measures implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 inevitably disrupted the nature
of social relationships. The authors expand Durkheim’s classic work on organic and mechanical
solidarity by proposing two new forms of solidarity: fragmentary (based on distancing) and ordi-
nary solidarity (based on empathy and equal treatment). Fragmentary solidarity creates what the
authors define as a conflict of solidarities. The authors provide a general model of conflicting
solidarities and numerous examples of how such conflicts have unfolded during the pandemic.
For example, fragmentary and mechanical solidarities clash when “the domestic space of
mechanical solidarity is overburdened with labor and educational functions.” Instead, the con-
flict between fragmentary and organic solidarity becomes apparent among those classified as
essential workers who serve as “sacrificial victim[s] of the maintenance of the minimum operat-
ing conditions of organic solidarity” by performing roles that simultaneously “inhabit and do not
inhabit the time of confinement.”
The sacrificial nature of essential workers is central to the paper by Ian Carrillo and Annabel
Ipsen (2021). Drawing on environmental justice and agrifood scholarship, the authors analyze
the role of meatpacking facilities as COVID-19 hotspots. The authors argue that the meatpacking
industry exhibits a long trend of precarity convergence characterized by two main factors: indus-
trial consolidation resulting from concentrated corporate power and labor marginalization due to
the intentional targeting of marginalized workers (e.g., people of color, immigrants, and refu-
gees). All of this is accomplished under the complicit eye of the state, which permits mergers,
provides subsidies, and implements policies that protect polluters. Under these conditions, meat-
packing worksites become “sacrifice zones” where marginalized workers are disproportionally
exposed to noxious working spaces. As the authors note, this conceptualization can be easily
extended beyond the meatpacking industry to other essential work areas (e.g., health care, farm-
ing, and education).

Pandemic Media and Discursive Environments

Two papers investigate the pandemic discourse in traditional and new media. Angie Y. Chung
and colleagues (2021) analyze how U.S. and South Korean online newspapers and cable news
channels of varying ideological positions framed China as the national or racialized “other.”
Davis et al. 685

They find three main themes. The first theme frames China as an adversary, an “evil communist
regime” or “rogue state” (conservative Fox News and Chosun) that lacks transparency (liberal
MSNBC and Hankyoreh). The second theme includes disputes over border policy, with conser-
vative media in both countries blaming the left for wanting open borders, and liberal media
emphasizing international cooperation and alternative measures to travel restrictions (e.g., quar-
antine). In the last theme, the authors find that anti-Asian hostility is briefly discussed in U.S.
media (and subtly validated by conservative media); in Korean media, narratives of anti-Asian
hate and crime are central across the political spectrum.
Josefina Flores Morales and Fanni Farago (2021) analyze the discourse of undocumented
immigrants on Twitter. While they focus on pro-immigrant discourse (searching for the term
“undocumented” rather than “illegal” or “unauthorized”), they find that support for immigrants
still largely depends on the perception that they are deserving because of their contribution to
economic productivity (they “pay taxes too, are essential workers too, pick and cook our food
while many of us are in quarantine”). Despite the pro-immigrant focus of the data collection, the
authors find examples of anti-immigrant rhetoric (e.g., “They are not Americans.” They “ARE a
health risk.”)

Structural Conditions of Pandemic Risk

During the early stages of the pandemic, one of the dominant messages in public discourse was
to flatten the curve or to reduce the virus transmission through non-pharmaceutical interventions.
The efficacy of these strategies depends on the compliance of populations, which are constrained
by belief systems (“do I want to stay at home?”) and structural opportunities (“can I stay at
home?”). Three papers address issues related to the structural conditions of pandemic risk.
Using geo-behavioral data, Terrence Hill, Kelsey E. Gonzalez, and Andrew Davis (2020) find
that states with greater Trump support show lower levels of sheltering-in-place and greater
mobility (distance traveled). Kathryn Anderson, Angelica Lopez, and Dylan Simburger (2021)
extend the literature on racial/ethnic residential segregation and health by analyzing the associa-
tion between zip code-level segregation and COVID-19 cases in New York City, Chicago,
Houston, and San Diego. These authors find that black and Latino residential clustering is associ-
ated with a higher infection rate. Emily Rauscher and Ailish Burns (2021) focus on one specific
non-pharmaceutical intervention: school closures. Using county-level data and two matching
techniques, they find that delays in school closures are associated with higher death rates per
capita, especially in counties with a larger share of black or poor residents. In this sense, the
authors suggest that schools can be unequal opportunity spreaders.

Pandemic Labor Processes

Although the pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of social life, work is among the most
impacted. Two papers explore the increasing precarity of labor during COVID-19. Lola
Loustaunau and colleagues (2021) present a project based on longitudinal in-depth interviews
(before and during the pandemic). In their follow-up interviews, they find that interviewees expe-
rience a moment of “precarious stability.” Along with more work hours and more predictable
schedules came the wages of fear, enhanced emotional labor, and obvious threats to bodily
integrity.
Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, Erica Janko, and Ken Kowalski (2021) interviewed precarious
workers and other low-income workers in New York City during the early stages of the pan-
demic. These workers navigated tension between the threat of unemployment and the intricacies
of navigating the welfare system to obtain unemployment benefits. They faced three major obsta-
cles to accessing unemployment assistance: not knowing how (“you can’t get blood from a
686 Sociological Perspectives 64(5)

stone”), not wanting to (“I don’t believe in free rides, I believe in hard work”), and not being able
to wait (“The government is flaking on me and they’re not really helping me out here”). The solu-
tion for these workers was to increasingly rely on “gig work” and other informal jobs as a safety
net.
Michelle Lee Maroto, David Pettinicchio, and Martin Lukk (2021) focus on the experience of
workers with disabilities and chronic conditions in Canada. This is a category of workers who
experience greater disadvantages in standard times and who have significant health risks in the
context of COVID-19. Using a multimethod approach, these authors note not only the struggles
of those who have lost employment due to the pandemic but also the growing concerns and inse-
curity among those who still have a job, especially if non-unionized or employed part-time.
Despite the fact that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit is helping some to “stay afloat,”
other community services are disappearing.

Pandemic Lifestyles
Health behavior and lifestyles are arguably more important during an infectious disease pan-
demic (e.g., social distancing, washing hands, and wearing masks) than in the context of chronic
disease (e.g., diet, exercise, and substance use). The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case to
examine the formation of pandemic health behaviors and lifestyles. Building on an ongoing
investigation of middle-class parents and children, Stefanie Mollborn, Katie Holstein Mercer,
and Theresa Edwards-Capen (2021) show that parents use preexisting health lifestyles to frame
social distancing messages. Social distancing is linked to desirable traits like group distinctions
(“Here’s what other people are doing. Here’s why we’re not going to be doing that”), morality
(respect and responsibility), and worth (social distancing shows people’s “true colors,” which
allows interviewees to “separate the wheat from the chaff”).
Christine Horne and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson (2021) use an experimental design to exam-
ine the issue of norm formation in the context of social distancing. They seek to explain the
extent to which people expect Democrats and Republicans to disapprove of resisting social dis-
tancing. These expectations depend on the expected consequences of defiant behavior and group
membership. Interestingly, expectations about social distancing of Republicans vary remarkably
across liberal and conservative participants.
In another experimental study, Justin Sola (2021) investigates a unique manipulation relevant
to the desire to buy guns. After validating a new measure of gun desirability, the author finds that
exposure to a one-minute video reporting long lines and shortages at grocery stores, pharmacies,
liquor outlets, and gun stores increases the desire for guns, net of a host of controls, including
political ideology, religious identity, and gun ownership. As Sola suggests, this study provides
researchers with a tool to investigate why individuals may seek guns in the future.
Individual responses to the pandemic are also a function of one’s trust in scientists and science
agencies. Using data from three surveys conducted from January to July 2020, Lawrence C.
Hamilton and Thomas G. Safford (2021) document a rapid decline in trust toward agencies such
as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention among Republicans. This decline mirrors a
striking shift in Trump’s attitude toward the CDC, which occurred in March and was amplified
by conservative media. As a result, the Democrat-Republican gap in trust toward science agen-
cies increased from 10 to 64 percentage points. Furthermore, respondents reporting low trust in
scientists are also less compliant with behaviors recommended by science agencies.

Organizational and Institutional Responses

The COVID-19 pandemic not only threatened and altered the lives of individuals, but also the
lives of countless organizations. Two papers investigate organizational adaptations. Alex Kinney
Davis et al. 687

and Nicholas Rowland (2021) build on organizational theories about provisional institutions to
analyze a unique data set of a rural state university’s faculty senate deliberations about a tempo-
rary, supplemental grading policy. The authors note that while provisional institutions are usually
understood to shift into more stable and enduring configurations, this supplemental grading pol-
icy is intentionally designed to expedite a return to pre-pandemic arrangements.
Finally, Yongjun Zhang (2021) investigates two particular kinds of organizational responses,
them being corporate social responsibility and political activities. The author analyzes the largest
publicly traded firms in the United States and finds that they engaged in both of these nonmarket
strategies to cope with COVID-19. In the first three quarters of 2020, companies made or pledged
almost $4 billion in corporate social responsibility contributions and approximately $2 billion in
contributions to corporate political activities lobbying. Several factors account for variations in
organizational behavior, including liberal-leaning corporate elites engaging in and contributing
to more corporate social responsibility, politically accountable firms engaging in more corporate
social responsibility and corporate political activities, and corporate elites being more concerned
with COVID-19 risk shying away from corporate social responsibility.

Concluding Remarks
When engaging with the special issue, we expect that readers will be impressed by the diversity
of theoretical and methodological approaches, the variety of substantive research themes, and the
range of data sources analyzed. As Guest Editors, it is our hope that this special issue is success-
ful in generating future research on the social causes and social consequences of the COVID-19
pandemic in the field of sociology and other disciplines. Moreover, we hope that the research
presented in this special issue makes a mark on informing the ongoing public discussions on the
pandemic.

Andrew P. Davis
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State
University, Raleigh, NC, USA

Simone Rambotti
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans,
LA, USA

Terrence D. Hill
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San
Antonio, TX, USA

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biographies
Andrew P. Davis is an assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. His research
explores various dynamics of politics, organizations, and culture from a comparative perspective. His most
recent published work focuses on human rights in shaping institutional trust.
Simone Rambotti is an assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University New Orleans. He is interested
in the social factors that make some communities healthier than others.
Terrence D. Hill is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His
research examines social inequalities in health and human suffering.