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JOS0010.1177/1440783320939416Journal of SociologyMatthewman and Huppatz

Article
Journal of Sociology

A sociology of Covid-19
1­–9
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1440783320939416
https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783320939416
journals.sagepub.com/home/jos

Steve Matthewman
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Kate Huppatz
Western Sydney University, Australia

Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic presents the profoundest public health and economic crisis of our
times. The seemingly impossible has happened: borders have closed, nations have locked down,
and individuals have socially isolated for the collective good. We find ourselves involved in
an unprecedented social experiment. This living laboratory is ripe for sociological analysis. In
this introductory article, we provide a broad sociology of Covid-19, paying attention to the
production of pandemics and the creation of vulnerabilities. We acknowledge the dystopian
elements of the pandemic: it will provide opportunities for ‘disaster capitalists’ to profit, it will
enhance certain forms of surveillance, and it will impact some constituencies far more negatively
than others (here we pay particular attention to the pandemic’s gendered consequences). Yet
there are also resources for hope. We are witnessing altruistic acts the world over, as mutual
aid groups form to render assistance where needed. Notions of welfare reform, progressive
taxation, nationalisation and universal basic income now seem more politically palatable. Some
even predict the imminent demise of neoliberalism. While this may be too hopeful, reactions to
the pandemic thus far do at least demonstrate that other ways of living are within our grasp. As
Arundhati Roy has said: the virus is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

Keywords
altruism, Covid-19, gender, neoliberalism, pandemic, production of vulnerability, risk, sociology
of disasters, surveillance, zoonosis

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented changes, unsettling multi-
ple facets of our existence. The seemingly ‘impossible’ has already happened: ‘the
world as we knew it has stopped turning, whole countries are in a lockdown, many

Corresponding author:
Steve Matthewman, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Email: [email protected]
2 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

of us are confined to our homes facing an uncertain future in which, even if most of
us survive, economic mega-crisis is likely’ (Žižek, 2020: 85). And this is only the
beginning . . .
There will doubtless be opportunities for some to profit from this dystopian scenario,
as ‘disaster capitalists’ (Klein, 2007) open up new markets and develop new commodities
in the domains of preparedness, protection, policing and care (Preston and Firth, forth-
coming). Authorities may also seek to centralise and consolidate their power during the
emergency. Scholars have long raised concerns that both executive over-reach and the
normalisation of the state of exception may become entrenched after disasters (Honig,
2009). Consequently, civil liberties can be curtailed in the longue durée. Some even see
the Covid-19 pandemic as a front to achieve such ends (Agamben, 2020). Edward
Snowden has warned that the state surveillance apparatus that has been mobilised to fight
Covid-19 – AI-driven thermal scanners in China, facial recognition technologies in Russia
– will be here to stay (Macaulay, 2020). And it won’t just be states who are looking to
solidify their power. Corporations will do the same among the new ranks of tele-workers
(Stokel-Walker, 2020). In reaction to these issues, on 23 April the Secretary-General of
the United Nations tweeted: ‘#COVID19 is a public health emergency – that is fast
becoming a human rights crisis’ (Guterres quoted in Wintour, 2020).
Jens Zinn (2020) has also written of Ulrich Beck’s conceptualisation of risk society
as ‘a new social condition, in which the state of exception becomes the new normal’.
Simply stated, Beck suggests that we are now facing the unintended consequences of
industrial modernity; that we can no longer predict or control the very threats that we
have created. However discourses of risk tend to be one dimensional. Ziauddan Sardar
(2010: 437) raises precisely this point. He takes the example of swine flu, which had
been primarily discussed in relation to risk, presented as actual or perceived harm. But,
as Sardar pointed out, swine flu is also about globalisation, intensive agriculture, multi-
national corporations, consumption patterns, international travel and medical educa-
tion. The epicentre of the major outbreak at Sardar’s time of writing was close to La
Gloria, Mexico, on the doorstep of a large industrial pig farm owned by the world’s
biggest pig farmer, Smithfield Foods. That it produces meat on such a scale shows that
there is consumer demand for it; that the flu spread so far so rapidly shows the number
of mobile citizens jetting around the world for business or pleasure; and that govern-
ments had to undertake extensive public health campaigns shows the level of concern
and/or contamination. Risk is clearly part of the landscape, but it is not the entire pic-
ture, and we do little to understand the place of risks in our world if we do not scrutinise
the very things that produce them. As sociologists we should identify the factors respon-
sible for the production of vulnerability.
Larry Brilliant, one of the World Health Organization (WHO) figures central to the
eradication of smallpox, observed that ‘Outbreaks are inevitable. Pandemics are optional’
(quoted in Matthewman, 2015: 27). Weak health systems are an obvious problem. Other
factors loom large. Intensive capitalist agricultural production is a breeding ground for
novel pathogens. Its reliance on domesticated monocultures also works against the exist-
ence of immunity, facilitating transmission. Increasing urban density allows such dis-
eases to spread quickly, while labour migrations and global commodity circuits work as
vectors which take them far from their place of origin. Capitalist expansion into new
Matthewman and Huppatz 3

regions also creates problems. Animals are driven out of their habitats into new domains
where they may come into contact with isolated disease strains. These animals may also
become new sources of commodification. And expansion means that humans may live in
closer proximity to them. In many parts of the world unregulated agribusiness adjoins
city-edge slums (Wallace, 2016). All of this increases the prospect of cross-species trans-
mission (zoonosis).
Fortunately, the news is not uniformly bad. As George Monbiot (2020) notes, we are
also seeing the rise of people power the world over, from the young volunteers in
Hyderabad who are provisioning the city’s precarious workers with food packages, to the
helpers in Wuhan who are ferrying essential medical workers between hospital and
home, to the programmers in Latvia who organised a hackathon to create optimal face
shield components for 3D printers, to the student babysitting service in Prague, and those
groups internationally who are picking up medical supplies for the elderly. ‘The shift is
even more interesting than it first appears’, Monbiot (2020) writes, ‘Power has migrated
not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place
altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilised where gov-
ernments have failed.’ A Kudos Organisational Dynamics survey of 1000 people found
that 81% of respondents thought that the coronavirus pandemic will leave behind a soci-
ety that has learned good lessons about ‘being in it together and being kind,’ while 88%
of those surveyed believed that this sense of community would either continue or grow
post-lockdown (Lourens, 2020: 2–3).
This outpouring of goodwill should not surprise us. First, disasters are essentially
social phenomena. Threats and experiences of such are public and shared. Collective
adversity creates social solidarity. This bonds people, providing the basis for physical
and emotional support. We are all in this together. Second, collective action can be
further encouraged as current power structures are nowhere near as robust as is com-
monly thought. The realisation that official assistance is seldom in the right place at the
right time in sufficient numbers gives civil society a boost. Third, we are essentially
social beings. We cannot exist alone. We are products of culture and collective labour.
We are, to a degree unknown among any other species, remarkably altruistic. Contra
the mantra of the neoliberals, Rebecca Solnit (2009: 305–6) concludes that we are
resilient and generous, committed to the possibility of doing things differently, desir-
ing of human connection and purpose. In disasters, then, a peculiar social energy
emerges. Rendering assistance of all types gives new definition to life – a reason for
being – which is being for others.
We live in interesting times. Monbiot (2020) claims that ‘You can watch neoliberal-
ism collapsing in real time.’ In the United States, Teen Vogue discusses the value of
mutual aid, the virtues of Peter Kropotkin, and the deficiencies of Donald Trump
(Diavolo, 2020). In New Zealand, a prominent right-wing commentator writes in the
business pages of the national newspaper that ‘if you’re wanting to win a war, the system
you’re looking for is effectively communism’ (Hooton, 2020: A17). Rob Campbell, chair
of Tourism Holdings, SkyCity Entertainment and the Summerset Group, concurs: ‘there’s
no one more socialist than a businessman who has had his business go bad. The hand
goes out to government pretty quickly’ (quoted in Fox, 2020: C5). Even the Editorial
Board of the Financial Times (2020) have called time on the neoliberal project:
4 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need
to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They
must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour
markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly
and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and
wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

As the discipline charged with making sense of contemporary social cohesion and trans-
formation, sociology is well placed to comment on coronavirus and its profound conse-
quences. Ever since Émile Durkheim’s (2002 [1897]) pioneering work we have known
that misfortune is socially patterned. Victimology records this: the isolated, weak, minori-
ties and the less wealthy consistently fare worse in disaster situations (Matthewman,
2015: 20–1). Infection fatality rate (IFR) is correlated with age. The elderly are feeling
coronavirus’ physical impacts the most. In terms of social impacts, it could be that the
youth are most affected by the lockdown. They are having to forgo work and their educa-
tion is being compromised (Financial Times, 2020). The pandemic is racialised. Asians
are being scapegoated and attacked, for spreading the virus (Tavernise and Oppel Jr,
2020), while official statistics show marked differences between black and white IFRs
(Timothy, 2020). Indigenous groups are also at great risk. In Aotearoa New Zealand the
‘estimated IFR for Māori is around 50% higher than non-Māori’ (Steyn et al., 2020). In
Australia, the impact of Covid-19 on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is underscored
by a traumatic history of post-invasion epidemics, ‘years of neglect and a failure to address
social determinants of health’ (Rallah-Baker, 2000). As Paula Braverman (2020) wrote for
the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab: ‘Inequality is our pre-existing condition.’
There is an obvious gender component too. Women are on the frontline of coronavi-
rus. The majority of the planet’s healthcare and social care workers are female. The
WHO puts the figure at 70% (Boniol et al., 2019). And this statistic only considers paid
care – the bulk of health care is actually unpaid and performed by women in the home
(Battyany, 2020). Women perform over 75% of all of the world’s unpaid work
(International Labour Organization, 2018: xxix) and we have seen the consequences of
the unequal domestic division of labour in academic journals during Covid-19. Women
scholars have been unable to produce as much research as their male colleagues while
caring for relatives with the virus and while schools and childcare centres have been
closed (Hutt, 2020). This has resulted in significant falls in their article authorship during
the pandemic. It has been reported that there is up to a 50% drop in article submission by
women authors in astrophysics and more than a 50% increase in submissions from men
in political studies (Kitchener, 2020). At the Journal of Sociology, we have compared
submission data from March to May in 2019 with the same period in 2020 and have
calculated a 12.5% increase for men and a 25% decrease for women. Thus, the pandemic
reveals and exaggerates the disadvantage that primary carers experience in building
research careers. This is at a time when academics are anxious to cultivate their produc-
tivity – university budgets have been dramatically impacted by Covid-19 and mass job
losses are expected. Yet, most Australian universities have treated their employees’
intensified caring obligations during the pandemic as an individual and private matter
(Nash and Churchill, 2020).
Matthewman and Huppatz 5

In many (most?) parts of the world, job losses will also affect women far more than
men. As New Zealand’s finance minister, Grant Robinson, noted: ‘There is a real gender
impact of job loss; if you look particularly at a sector like tourism, hospitality, or retail,
there is a disproportionate number of women in those industries’ (quoted in Watkins and
Lourens, 2020: 3). In Australia, the Covid-19 economic downturn has been declared a
‘pink recession’ as more than half of those who have lost their jobs are women (Crabb,
2020). This makes this recession very different to those of the past, it has the potential to
rewind the hard-won progress that women have made to increase their representation in
the paid workforce. Writing in The Guardian, Moira Donegan (2020) voiced fears that
the pandemic will undo generations of feminist progress. She concluded: ‘It is still not
clear what life will look like after the pandemic, but it seems increasingly likely that
much more of it will be confined to that place that women have been striving for decades
to get out of: the house.’
Of course, official statistics only show us so much. What they occlude can be just as
revealing. The Chair of the British Medical Association has condemned the British
state’s failure to capture Covid-19 ethnicity data as a ‘scandal’ (Nagpaul quoted in Iqbal,
2020). The government’s own figures only record hospital deaths (the statistics office
tallies them all), leading Caroline Abrahams, head of the charity Age UK, to say that the
daily figures ‘are airbrushing older people out like they don’t matter’ (quoted in
Associated Press, 2020). Many elderly people have been given precisely this message,
particularly when the value of their lives is measured against the value of the economy.
Leading from the front, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, told Fox News
viewers that he would rather die than have public health interventions interfere with the
economy. He felt that America’s grandparents would agree. He urged workers to get back
to it, and the 70+ population to take care of themselves (Žižek, 2020: 101). Republican
Representative Trey Hollingsworth, who is not in that age cohort, had a similar view: ‘it
is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of
our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always
choose the latter’ (quoted in LeBlanc, 2020).
Disasters are ripe for sociological intervention. Michael Guggenheim (2016: 6–7)
urges us to see them as research sites to illuminate politics, as material events whose
production needs to be understood, and as cosmopolitics which scrutinise the configura-
tion of the world. ‘Disasters’, he writes, are ‘inherently political events because they
pose questions about who should be allowed to re-compose the world and how’
(Guggenheim, 2014: 4). And as Slavoj Žižek (2020: 4) has said of our current crisis, ‘We
will have to raise the key question: What is wrong with our system that we were caught
unprepared by the catastrophe despite scientists warning us about it for years?’
Thinkers of various persuasions have noted that the truth only reveals itself in
moments of rupture (Baudrillard, 2005: 16; Virilio, 1999: 89; Žižek, 2008: 144). What
does this pandemic reveal? As noted in the discussion above, the pandemic has shown us
the altruism of people and the preferences of the powerful (in terms of who and what
counts). It also tells us something about the state of our world. People, non-human life-
forms, information and commodities move. The ecosystems and earth systems that sus-
tain us are also always in flux (Matthewman, 2017). Given global flows of goods and
people the potential now exists for worldwide disasters. Pandemics do not respect
6 Journal of Sociology 00(0)

political borders. You cannot build a wall to stop coronavirus. Ours is a cosmopolitan
world, not one of national seclusion. ‘The coronavirus epidemic . . . signals the . . . fatal
limit of nationalist populism which insists on full state sovereignty: it’s over with
“America (or whoever) first!” since America can be saved only through global coordina-
tion and collaboration’ (Žižek, 2020: 68).
Sociologists also know that the jobs with the highest pay may be the least socially
useful (Lawlor et al., 2009). Covid-19 has given us something of a status reversal,
showing us who the truly essential workers are. It turns out that financial arbitrage does
not put food on the table, nor does public relations cure the afflicted. In addition to
healthcare professionals, the heroes of the lockdown have been the supermarket work-
ers, the refuse collectors, the couriers and the cleaners. ‘These are our essential work-
ers,’ said New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, ‘and I hope we continue to
recognise them as that long after this pandemic has passed’ (quoted in 1 News, 2020).
It is too soon to reach conclusions about something which is still under way, but if
nothing else the coronavirus pandemic tells us that the impossible happens, and that
other ways of living are within our grasp. Governments have shown that they have the
capacity to engage in creative policy making that could ensure a more equitable society,
as was seen in the provision of free childcare in Australia. Thus, the pandemic forces a
reimagination of the social; the ‘virus is a portal, a gateway between one world and the
next’ (Roy, 2020). Community responses to Covid-19 the world over also affirm a point
Albert Camus (1991: 150) made in the final chapter of his novel The Plague: ‘and to state
quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire
in [people] than to despise’.
This special issue aims to identify what we might learn through sociology as we deter-
mine the social impacts of Covid-19 and rethink our social worlds – each article or com-
mentary piece focuses on a substantive area of study, including social theory, the
economic impact in Māori and Pacific communities, the consequences for global sport,
the genered impacts of Covid-19 and the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.
As a portal, the virus demands that we all think sociologically, in this special issue our
team of scholars provide a guiding hand.

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

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Author biographies
Steve Matthewman is an associate professor in Sociology at the University of Auckland, New
Zealand. He is the Immediate President of the Sociological Association of Aoteroa New Zealand
(2014–19). His current research project looks at the rebuilding of Christchurch following the earth-
quakes of 2010 and 2011. He co-edits the Journal of Sociology with Kate Huppatz.
Kate Huppatz is an associate professor in Sociology at Western Sydney University, Australia. She
has long-standing research interests at the nexus of gender, social class, occupations and mother-
ing. She is co-editor in chief of the Journal of Sociology. Her forthcoming monograph for Palgrave
Macmillan is titled Gender, Work and Social Theory.