Among crises: Making sense of COVID-19

R&R

ABSTRACT: Relying on interviews with 60 businesspeople coping with COVID-19, this paper shows that individuals interpret crisis with reference to other previous crises they have faced. A model of everyday life among crises is therefore put forward, one that conceptualizes crisis as recurrent, rather than singular or continuous. Among crises, comparisons to past experiences create meaning of the situation at hand: businesspeople who perceived COVID-19 to have analogues to crises they had (successfully) faced before were hopeful about their ability to cope with the pandemic, while those who insisted that the pandemic was wholly new and without precedent were more pessimistic than their peers. In this way, unsettled times enter cultural repertoires and might even contribute to crisis resilience. Despite the methodological and conceptual problems implicated in conceptualizing a recurrence of the unique or contingent, crisis recurrence is a meaningful part of everyday lives.