‘Delightfully creative chaos’, hybridity and the citizen supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic in England

• In Event: Big Data, Civic Networks, and Creative Collaboration

Abstract

This paper is part of an ongoing micro-level empirical study, with the late Colin Rochester, of voluntary action and the production of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic in England. It treats the individuals and groups/organisations involved as legitimate subjects and investigates their activities in the round - who took part, why they joined in, what they did, who they did it for, how they did it, and what they thought about what they were doing. It focuses on ‘what they did’ and the ‘delightfully creative chaos’1 in which they so successfully stepped up and produced a large amount of urgently-needed PPE - different types of actors, different organisational arrangements, different levels of activity, different sectors of operation and, most importantly, different methods of networking and collaboration.

Mainstream or ‘flat earth’ research2 on voluntary action has shown little interest in the sorts of people and groups/organisations engaged in the production of PPE and accordingly treated them and their activities (if at all) as walk-ons in other, more salient, narratives. This hierarchical approach prioritises volunteering in the voluntary sector over that in other sectors; volunteering in organisations (formal) over that by individuals (informal); bureaucratically-managed volunteering over that which is self-organised ‘regular’ volunteering over that which is spontaneous; and volunteering for the provision of public services over that for other purposes such as serious leisure or activism. In consequence the knowledge base is partial and skewed, and it does not provide a firm basis for assessing ‘lessons learned’ in this and, arguably, future crises.

This paper uses ‘thick’ data collected through documentary, quantitative and qualitative methods: (1) an online trawl for information (downloaded and preserved) about individuals and groups/organisations known to be active, including their contact details (N = 2,199); (2) an online census (N of responses = 247 people involved as individuals and 1,608 people involved in over 400 different organisations/groups; (3) case studies of organisational hybridity using the framework set out by Billis and Rochester3 to assess the effectiveness of the different organisational arrangements within and across all sectors. The first two stages were self-funded; and the third, by a Small Research Grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme.

If it is ‘the critical scholar’s aim to examine those things we have stopped thinking about’4, then it is a good idea to start thinking about a ‘round earth map’5 in order to deal with what is missing. This study, which documents important activities barely noted in mainstream literature, offers an opportunity to incorporate what has hitherto been missing into the knowledge base.

The pandemic has highlighted some of the inadequacies of the ‘flat earth’ view of voluntary action. This is particularly the case in the field of resilience/emergency response, where researchers have noted the critical importance of nurturing mutual aid groups for their capacity to respond to emergencies.6 This functional and policy-level focus on round earth subjects is to be welcomed as such and as an opportunity for convergence with the civil society focus of research in Europe and the Global South.7

References

1Lord Dahrendorf (2003), ‘Foreword’ to Jeremy Kendall, The Voluntary Sector. London & New York, Routledge, xiv.
2Colin Rochester (2013), Rediscovering Voluntary Action: The Beat of a Different Drum. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 176-88.
3David Billis and Colin Rochester (eds.) (2020), Handbook on Hybridity, Chapters 1, 24, 27, 29. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-29, 424-47, 486-506, 522-45.
4Jon Dean (2022), ‘Informal Volunteering, Inequality, and Illegitimacy,’ Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 51(3): 535.
5 Rochester (2013).
6John Drury, Holly Carter, Evangelos Ntontis and Selin Tekin Guven (2021), ‘Public behaviour in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: understanding the role of group processes, BJPsych (Open) 7(1): 1-6.
7 Mark Lyons, Philip Wijkstrom and Gil Clary (1998), ‘Comparative studies of volunteering: What is being studied?’ Voluntary Action 1(1): 45-54.

Author

• Meta Zimmeck