Weaving public health and safety nets to respond the COVID-19 pandemic

Di Fan; Yi Li; Wei Liu; Xiao-Guang Yue; Georgios Boustras

doi:10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105058

Weaving public health and safety nets to respond the COVID-19 pandemic

Saf Sci. 2021 Feb:134:105058. doi: 10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105058. Epub 2020 Oct 22.

Authors

Di Fan¹, Yi Li², Wei Liu³, Xiao-Guang Yue⁴, Georgios Boustras⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Management & Marketing, Swinburne Business School, Faculty of Business and Law, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne 3123, Australia.
² Discipline of International Business, The University of Sydney Business School, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
³ Business School, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266110, China.
⁴ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Sciences, European University Cyprus, Nicosia 1516, Cyprus.
⁵ Center of Excellence in Risk & Decision Sciences, European University Cyprus, Nicosia 2404, Cyprus.

Abstract

How do governments take strategic actions in weaving public health and safety nets to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? Embracing Moore's strategic action framework, this study investigates how municipal governments can configure authorizing environment-operational capacity-public value attributes to weave public health and safety nets, in order to prevent and control the public health and safety emergency. Leveraging fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) with a sample of 323 Chinese cities, we identify a distinctive taxonomy of four equally effective configurations of urban actions in blocking COVID-19 transmission: social reassurance, proactive defence, decisive resiliency, and strengthened coercion. Overall, this study provides a novel insight of public health and safety management into battles against COVID-19 in human society.

Keywords: COVID-19; Government; Public health and safety; Strategic action; fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA).