Organizing Risks: Risk Work and Organizational Dynamics in China’s COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign

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Abstract

The social sciences are increasingly focused on unpredictable, high-stakes threats that provoke public apprehension, resistance, and conflicting views on risk management. Drawing on medical sociology, the sociology of risk, and bureaucracy studies, this article examines the contradictions inherent in state risk management practices on the ground. Using the case of China’s COVID-19 vaccination program, based on 80 in-depth interviews with 50 frontline government employees in a southern coastal city, we find that state agents selectively suppress certain citizens’ deviant risk values while accommodating others. This highlights the diverse risk interventions embedded in frontline workers’ daily information, cultural, and bodily work aimed at securing reluctant residents’ cooperation. We identify four modes of risk organizing—synergetic, substitutive, performative, and recalcitrant—shaped by power discrepancies between frontline bureaucrats and residents and the level of intra-bureaucratic conflict. This study offers a comparative framework for understanding how local contestation of risk varies across neighborhoods in everyday state governance.

Authors

• Yan Long, University of California-Berkeley

• Wei Luo, Peking University