Risk Governance in the Early Pandemic: Governance Roles and Coleman’s Taxonomy of Social Actors

This article takes the ongoing conversation around risk governance in the context of the early stages of the COVID pandemic in a new direction. It does so by connecting public health risk governance to James Coleman’s formulation of social actorhood in the contemporary US. Risk governance across a variety of social settings can be fruitfully conceptualized according to Coleman’s taxonomy of natural and constructed social actors. Unveiling the risk governance schemes operating within distinct social settings is a matter of teasing out the governance roles played by the three primary types of social actor introduced by Coleman: natural persons, agents/principals, and citizen-sovereigns. The parts played by these types of actors are examined within distinct meso-level settings such as households, employment settings, public-facing retail settings, and colleges. In this way, the study is able to distinguish specific governance schemes in terms of how they mobilize particular kinds of social actors characterized according to Coleman’s taxonomy. The study represents a step toward developing an account of risk governance which can accommodate a wide variety of actors, settings, and dynamics within a coherent theoretical framework. In carrying out this exercise, this study applies sociological theories to open a window into crucial aspects of risk governance during the pandemic era.