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Abstract
Interviews with 60 businesspeople coping with COVID-19 show that they elaborate the pandemic with reference to other crises they have faced. A model of sensemaking among crises is put forward, conceptualizing crises as recurrent, rather than singular or continuous. Among crises, comparisons to past experiences help make sense of the present situation: businesspeople who perceived COVID-19 to have analogues to crises they had (successfully) faced before felt hopeful about their ability to cope with the pandemic, while those who insisted that the pandemic was without precedent were more pessimistic than their peers. In this way, crises enter cultural repertoires, helping to make sense of unsettled times and even underpinning expectations of resilience. This process is an integral part of the entrepreneurial story: given cultural repertoires replete with narratives of virtuous economic actors successfully surmounting crises and managing risk, it is among crises that businesspeople either substantiate or challenge such beliefs.

This article aims for a conceptual model of how crises and events function together and apart, starting from the view that the two are not interchangeable. I therefore define events as structural transformations that can be the object of empirical knowledge, but which are not self-evident or known to all as they take place. Crisis-claims, meanwhile, are performative judgments or demands for a different future. Given that structural transformations are not self-evident in the moment, a crisis-claim, in this sense, is a guess that an event is taking place. This distinction is elucidated through a computational text analysis of U.S. media reporting on shootings, focusing on the month before and the month after George Floyd's death. Building on this conceptual distinction, I argue that events and crises can coincide, constitute, and even modify the other. But crises can occur without reference to events, and events can take place which are not deemed to be crises.

AbstractBoth lay understandings of crisis moments and influential psychological models of cognition in times of uncertainty emphasize how crises limit thinking. Conversely, scholars as diverse as Foucault, Swidler, Bourdieu, and Butler have elaborated generative conceptions of crisis, which specify crises as moments of change, transformation, and heightened cognition. The research presented here takes up the question of how crises become thinkable, as actors gradually make sense of a newly uncertain context. Against a backdrop of polarization on the topic, in-depth interviews with 60 businesspeople navigating the coronavirus pandemic show that they see public health and economic well-being as interrelated. This has important effects on how businesses interpret and implement government directives and public health guidelines, from choosing to close before being mandated to do so, to staying closed even when allowed to reopen. Taken together, these findings substantiate generative models of crisis while drawing attention to the polysemous justifications elaborated by actors as they navigate shifting cultural and social scaffoldings.

Both lay understandings of crisis moments and influential psychological models of cognition in times of uncertainty emphasize how crises limit thinking. Conversely, scholars as diverse as Foucault, Swidler, Bourdieu, and Butler have elaborated generative conceptions of crisis, which specify crises as moments of change, transformation, and heightened cognition. The research presented here takes up the question of how crises become thinkable, as actors gradually make sense of a newly uncertain context. Against a backdrop of polarization on the topic, in-depth interviews with 60 businesspeople navigating the coronavirus pandemic show that they see public health and economic well-being as interrelated. This has important effects on how businesses interpret and implement government directives and public health guidelines, from choosing to close before being mandated to do so, to staying closed even when allowed to reopen. Taken together, these findings substantiate generative models of crisis while drawing attention to the polysemous justifications elaborated by actors as they navigate shifting cultural and social scaffoldings.

Despite research on the causes of populism and on the narratives of populist leaders, there is little empirical work on the relationship between populist attitudes and behavior, notably including criminal behavior. Our overarching concern is the recurrent social volatility of metaphorical populist themes that are central to impactful political messaging. Drawing on a national United States survey conducted around the 2016 election, we use multilevel models to show that the politically charged exclusionary boundaries of "America First" populism are behaviorally connected to increased odds of having been arrested. We argue that the rapid redrawing of social boundaries that make up populist attitudes is closely connected with the effects of economic and political frustrations during times of rapid social change. In the process, we develop a behavioral analysis of the social volatility of the recurrent populist movement in America.