The Moral Economy of Severe Scarcity: How Considerations of Deservingness Shape Cloth Mask Distribution Practices in the Midst of a Global Health CrisisHonorable Mention, the 2025 ASA Consumers and Consumption Section Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented scarcity of face masks and spurred massive home-based cloth mask-making across the U.S. In the context of severe shortages, mask-makers had to consider the idea of deservingness when deciding who should get their masks, and who should bear their cost. Based on the data from a private Facebook group dedicated to sewing and thirty-one in-depth interviews with mask-makers in Massachusetts, we argue that in response to pandemic-induced scarcity, mask-makers created a distinct moral economy with numerous distributional practices ranging from gift-giving and altruistic donations to sales. The choices among these alternatives depended on how mask-makers perceived their own vulnerabilities and deservingness vis-a-vis those of intended mask recipients. The same mask-makers sometimes engaged in multiple types of distributional practices or shifted between them over time, while justifying these choices in moral terms. Thus, the scarcity of masks resulted in a complex moral economy governed by multiple and sometimes contradictory logics of deservingness. Our study adds to a growing body of work that examines how considerations of deservingness factor into allocative decisions, while also providing a rare insight into how extremely scarce life-saving goods are allocated in the context of a global pandemic.
Source: Journal of Cultural Economy
Authors: Ya-Ching Huang, Alya Guseva
Institution: Boston University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: Boston University
OpenAlex ID: W4402930069