Repertoires of repair: managing ontological insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract This article examines the practices used by people who, while in a state of crisis, attempt to restore the sense of continuity and dependability in their environment that is a prerequisite for meaningful social action. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 115 people conducted during the catastrophic first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, we identify major categories and triggers of disruption as well as what we call the “repertoires of repair,” socially learned practices employed to bridge these ruptures. We find two main categories of repair work: changes to the socio-material environment of action, and changes to cognition. We refer to these categories as “agentic enactment” and “cognitive grounding” respectively. In our conclusion we suggest some implications of seeing ontological security as an ongoing relational achievement rather than a latent state of individual psychology. Challenging a transformational bias in sociology, we call for further research on the cultural work people do to produce continuity against continual disruption, and how even these efforts can paradoxically result in unintended social change.