Navigating Compliance: "Innovative" Handlungsweisen im Umgang mit neuen normativen Anforderungen in der Corona-Krise
Options
Description
This paper examines how individuals coped with incertitude during the COVID-19 crisis, exploring how they responded to the everyday challenges posed by institutionally defined measures to contain the pandemic. Referring to Merton, the analysis addresses “innovative” forms of dealing with new normative standards, which are situated between compliance and non-compliance. “Innovation” here does not imply a rejection of the measures, but rather a selective, creative engagement with them. The aim is to understand how individuals, under conditions of social uncertainty and an insecure knowledge base, negotiate normative expectations and make situational decisions about whether to comply with or deviate from norms.
Based on an understanding of crisis and incertitude as potentially productive, contingency-opening situations (Oevermann 1996; Sammet 2014; Scoones 2024), crisis is conceived not as a state of deficit or collapse, but as a moment of heightened possibility in which established routines of everyday life lose their validity and new modes of action must be explored. These processes of coping with crisis can have transformative effects by irritating existing worldviews and contributing to their reconfiguration.
Worldviews are understood as theorizing acts of interpretation that process experiences through categorization, comparison (Heintz 2016), and typification (Schütz 2004). They link individual biographies (Fischer-Rosenthal 1991) with social positions (Hradil 2009) and thus emerge from the interplay of individual, collective, and structural dynamics, without being reducible to any one of these levels.
Empirically, the analysis focuses on two cases that exemplify adaptive, “innovative” ways of dealing with COVID-19 measures. Particular attention is given to vaccination as a paradigmatic dichotomous decision situation (yes/no), which – due to its irreversibility and social visibility – triggered specific dynamics of incertitude. Based on these cases, the paper investigates which social, cultural, and biographical resources actors mobilize in order to navigate contradictory challenges, and to what extent dealing with such situations can facilitate reflexive and transformative potentials.
Based on an understanding of crisis and incertitude as potentially productive, contingency-opening situations (Oevermann 1996; Sammet 2014; Scoones 2024), crisis is conceived not as a state of deficit or collapse, but as a moment of heightened possibility in which established routines of everyday life lose their validity and new modes of action must be explored. These processes of coping with crisis can have transformative effects by irritating existing worldviews and contributing to their reconfiguration.
Worldviews are understood as theorizing acts of interpretation that process experiences through categorization, comparison (Heintz 2016), and typification (Schütz 2004). They link individual biographies (Fischer-Rosenthal 1991) with social positions (Hradil 2009) and thus emerge from the interplay of individual, collective, and structural dynamics, without being reducible to any one of these levels.
Empirically, the analysis focuses on two cases that exemplify adaptive, “innovative” ways of dealing with COVID-19 measures. Particular attention is given to vaccination as a paradigmatic dichotomous decision situation (yes/no), which – due to its irreversibility and social visibility – triggered specific dynamics of incertitude. Based on these cases, the paper investigates which social, cultural, and biographical resources actors mobilize in order to navigate contradictory challenges, and to what extent dealing with such situations can facilitate reflexive and transformative potentials.
Date of Publication
2025-12-12
Publication Type
Conference Item
Keyword(s)
Sinnlogiken
•
Krise
•
Compliance
•
Covid-19
Language(s)
de
Contributor(s)
Sammet, Kornelia |
Additional Credits
Access(Rights)
metadata.only