Vulnerable care: Temporality in collective action during the COVID-19 crisis

Collective action is essential during times of crisis. Yet, while some actors are able to use the momentum to initiate new collective action, others struggle to maintain existing collective action due to differences in immediate crisis responses. Thus, to act collectively in a crisis, it is a key challenge to understand what influences the emergence and interruption of collective action. We offer a temporal perspective to address this challenge. By conducting a longitudinal, inductive study based on qualitative data sources, including 80 interviews, we explore the emergence, continuation and interruption of collective action by actors providing social care to vulnerable people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study highlights interactions between Eigenzeiten, the unique temporal structures that entities or groups develop. Particularly, we find that the interaction between temporal structures at crisis-, collective- and organizational levels lead to the unfolding of two distinct patterns, ‘from coordinating to covering’ and ‘from covering to coordinating’, which depend on whether the starting point is new or existing collective action. We explain the key differences for the progression of collective action in a crisis by attending to the interactions between underlying temporal structures, including their pace and temporal depth, and changes in these structures.