When accountability breaks down: socio-material assemblages in COVID-19 governance

Xu, Ying (2026) When accountability breaks down: socio-material assemblages in COVID-19 governance. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This study investigates the enactment and reconfiguration of accountability in the context of everyday community governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in an urban Chinese community. Much of the existing literature conceptualises accountability in hierarchical, institutional, and human-centred terms, treating it as either a mechanism of control by the state or a compliance response by citizens. A critical engagement with these literatures reveals a gap: the complex ways in which accountability is dynamically produced through the entanglement of human and non-human actors, technologies, and affective forces are underexplored. To address this, the central research question guiding this study is: How is accountability enacted, distributed, and reassembled through socio-material networks during a public health emergency? Subsidiary questions further explore how technologies, legal devices, and community practices contribute to the formation and destabilisation of accountability relations, and what these processes reveal about the nature of governance under crisis conditions.

Actor–Network Theory (ANT) was adopted both as a theoretical lens and as a methodological strategy. ANT’s utility lies in its insistence that no single actor—whether state, law, technology, or community—possesses pre-given explanatory power. Instead, agency and accountability emerge from the associations between heterogeneous elements. This theoretical move is particularly productive for a pandemic context, where accountability was not simply a matter of state directives or citizen compliance, but of how mobile phone health codes, quarantine seals, WeChat groups, policy documents, community workers, and residents were assembled into shifting networks. By “following the actors,” ANT makes it possible to capture accountability not as a stable institutional arrangement but as a fragile and contingent socio-material accomplishment. ANT also enables a rethinking of responsibility beyond normative categories of duty or liability, showing how accountability is enacted performatively, through translations, negotiations, and displacements among diverse actors.

Methodologically, the study employs a qualitative case study design. Data were generated over the course of the pandemic through ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, digital ethnography, and inscription analysis. This multi-method approach was chosen to capture the temporal unfolding of accountability relations and the multiplicity of sites—physical and digital—where they were negotiated. Ethnographic observations traced the rhythms of community life and the mundane practices of surveillance, compliance, and care. Interviews with residents and community workers surfaced perceptions of fairness, responsibility, and trust. Digital ethnography followed the circulation of accountability discourses in WeChat groups and online forums, while inscription analysis mapped how policy documents, notices, and seals codified responsibilities. Together, these methods operationalised ANT’s methodological imperative to track associations and translations across time and space, producing a richly textured account of pandemic governance.

The findings show that accountability was not a fixed attribute of institutions or individuals but an emergent, performative achievement. Non-human actors—health codes, quarantine seals, and algorithmic rating systems—were not merely instruments but constitutive participants in accountability practices, shifting responsibility and visibility among different actors. Affective forces such as fear, fatigue, and care animated these networks, influencing their stability and transformations. For example, while fear initially reinforced compliance with surveillance technologies, over time care and solidarity among residents generated new grassroots practices of accountability that partially displaced formal structures. When official systems faltered, these localised practices—sharing food, mutual monitoring, and informal coordination—temporarily stabilised governance.

These findings directly address the research questions by demonstrating how accountability was enacted through socio-material networks rather than imposed from above. They highlight the relational and contingent character of accountability: it is made and remade through negotiations between technological artefacts, legal discourses, human actors, and affective intensities. The study thus challenges the assumption that accountability can be reduced to hierarchical command or institutional design. Instead, it shows how accountability in crises is co-produced through fragile networks that are always at risk of breakdown.

The contribution of this research is threefold. First, it advances critical accounting scholarship by foregrounding the mundane, affective, and material dimensions of accountability, moving beyond static or instrumental accounts. Second, it extends public sector governance studies by demonstrating how accountability emerges not simply from state–citizen binaries but from distributed networks that include digital infrastructures and non-human mediators. Third, it enriches ANT itself by illustrating its capacity to capture the temporal, affective, and socio-material processes of crisis governance, while also revealing its limitations in addressing normative concerns about justice and responsibility. Ultimately, the study argues that effective accountability in crises does not depend on perfect systems of surveillance or formal legal controls, but on adaptive, caring, and materially attentive practices. This has implications for both theory and policy: theorists are urged to reconceptualise accountability as a socio-material performance rather than an institutional arrangement, while policymakers should recognise that resilient governance depends on supporting flexible, community-based forms of accountability rather than relying solely on top-down mechanisms.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5601 Accounting; J Political Science > JQ Political institutions Asia; R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School
• Supervisor's Name: Wickramasinghe, Professor Danture and Zou, Dr. Sisi
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-85829
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 19 Mar 2026 15:59
• Last Modified: 19 Mar 2026 15:59
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85829