Credentials as Regulatory Tools in the COVID Era

Credentials are the documents we are required to have in our possession to achieve certain ends—for instance, driving licenses, identity cards, passports, and credit cards. Credentials play an important role in COVID regulations. This paper aims to reconstruct and analyse their role during the pandemic. In particular, the paper will stress how credentials may act as an innovative non-prescriptive tool of social control. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.