Narratives of Disruptive Economic Change: Claiming and Contesting the Social Order

This article develops an analytic framework composed of six narrative forms through which disruptive economic change is interpreted and legitimized. Drawing on two eventful contexts—economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing climate transformations—I identify six narrative forms: redistribution, creative destruction, individual resilience, moral economy, decline for all, and growth for all. Each narrative constructs legitimacy through distinct temporal logics, visions of the state, and constructions of the social order. The analysis integrates insights from economic sociology, political sociology, and eventful theory to trace how narratives stabilize (in)equality and justify varying degrees of state intervention. The narrative forms all relate in different ways to crisis egalitarianism, the idea that disruption affects everyone equally; this interpretive tendency can legitimize postcrisis inequalities as natural or deserved. By treating narratives as eventful meaning-making devices, the framework advances a sociological understanding of legitimacy as a temporal construct.