Pandemic makers: How citizen groups mobilized resources to meet local
needs in a global health crisis
Abstract
The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing
uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom
examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research
indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods,
spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local
knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet
immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups
responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the
onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study,
we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources
in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of
the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups
connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted
to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We
identify three mechanisms—augmenting, circumventing, and
attenuating—that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their
resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight
how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and
legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn
when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.