Sociology, power and the global health crisis

Enver Vega Figueroa ^[1]

I. Problematization

The world is experiencing a multifaceted crisis and, in parallel, is living through the context of a pandemic caused by the Coronavirus, a disease discovered in China at the end of 2019. Thus the 21st century begins: with a pandemic in a context of economic and political crisis, crises that are latent threats against humanity; which have already become manifest –accelerated by the pandemic– rapidly destabilizing development, the economy, well-being, daily life and security.

We are in the midst of a crisis that accelerated and showed us a social reality prior to the crisis that was very different compared to the reality that the power structures always showed us: structures of political order, of financial order, of economic order, and the communicational power, whether in their conventional systems or in their digital systems.

From our theoretical and methodological perspective for the observation and analysis of these crises that the planet is experiencing, we must first identify the environment in which it arose: Did the global health crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic arise in a context of structural crisis – fundamentally economic – and crisis of legitimacy of power – mainly political crisis?

Yes. The global health crisis caused by the pandemic arose within a context of structural crisis and a crisis of legitimacy of political power (Robinson, 2020). The justification for this institutional precariousness has been dubbed the “new social coexistence .” According to the government and the media, citizens are to blame for becoming infected and dying, just as with crime: the victim is guilty and the criminal is innocent. The logic of the world turned upside down.

II. Fundamental Questions

Do social researchers, academics, the social science community, and social think tanks face epistemological, methodological, and scientific dilemmas that demand an evaluation of the dominant paradigms governing both macrosocial and microsocial life? Will it be necessary to return to the classics of sociology to understand present reality and to generate the knowledge that will allow us to build the future?

We are also facing other questions: These crises—structural, fundamentally economic, and of political power, fundamentally a crisis of the legitimacy of political institutions—do they have the capacity to reshape the social fabric and culture? Is this a virus that practically controls almost everything? Is the indeterminate post-pandemic period being sublimated by invoking a new normal? Does that new normal represent a multidimensional crisis?

Therefore, a profound, rigorous, and systematic academic reflection is urgently needed on the impact of the pandemic on social relations of production. For example, will it promote the establishment of collaborative social relations, or will it accentuate social relations of exploitation, neo-slavery, and domination? Does the post-pandemic era represent a new abnormality or a new dysfunction? And what about the restructuring of global capitalism? These are just some of the many questions that need to be addressed. I leave this open for informed discussion.

III. Questioning reality from a sociological perspective

Sociology is a discipline of power. Sociology is the fundamental discipline among the social sciences. As such, it constitutes a discipline of power: it constructs scientific knowledge and possesses a disruptive and transformative capacity.

The current world situation reveals and demands –increasingly– the great usefulness and the greater necessity of Sociology to show the relations of domination that determine the multidimensional problems that affect humanity.

How do we observe reality and how do we analyze, from a sociological perspective, the diverse social manifestations in a pandemic context? Can sociology generate socio-scientific evidence for decision-making at the community and governmental levels? How, in what way, under what methodological considerations, under what theoretical assumptions, and under what empirical observations?

Sociology is a fundamental discipline in managing crises as complex as the one we are currently experiencing, because the subjective construction of knowledge helps to understand the new social reality and generates the social scientific evidence for community and government decision-making based on sociological evidence in matters of well-being, human security and national development, as well as in matters of culture and technological changes.

Following Castells, without a critical and rigorous perspective, progress in society and communication is impossible; even more so in the network society: countries, interests, cultures and institutions, inequalities, etc.

A meta-analysis of the theoretical and methodological framework that Sociology uses to address power, humanitarian crises, social order, political order, economic order, cultural status, environmental status, technology, and security is urgently needed, with an emphasis on the natural and constructive conflict among them. Within this complex landscape of variations, pressing issues have emerged that demand the attention of the social sciences, and particularly Sociology.

In the liquid modernity we now inhabit, characteristic of a risk society, and considering the black swan phenomenon and the growing power of information and communication technologies, the reality generated by the first pandemic of the 21st century reminds us of the power of adaptation. Amidst this complexity, let us not lose sight of the complicity and complacency of a functionalism that sublimates and legitimizes everything, reducing human beings to the status of things—a phenomenon known as objectification or reification.

Is this perhaps the post-pandemic scenario? What are your thoughts on this?

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^[1] Systemic Laboratory of Social Scientific Research of Peru orcid.org/0000-0002-1602-2875.

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