Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
On 5 May 2023, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus declared the COVID-19 pandemic over. According to the WHO, the virus continues to kill and mutate, but it no longer poses a threat to public health. During the more than three-year pandemic, the virus infected 765 million people and killed 6.9 million. Europe was the continent most affected, with almost 3 million deaths due to, or as a result of, the infection. In Sweden, life had already transitioned to a post-pandemic state in the late spring of 2022. The period since then that has passed since then has offered numerous evaluations, reflections and reviews of how the pandemic was handled in different areas and what consequences it had. At the same time, media coverage, and thus public interest in the pandemic, has waned. The outbreak of war in Ukraine in the spring of 2022 and the subsequent economic developments, with increased inflation, galloping energy prices and rising interest rates, have quickly taken over the media agenda. In light of these dramatic developments, thus, the chapter put the pandemic in a broader perspective where it has come to be regarded as a crisis that is both linked to and parallel with other existing and anticipated crises.
The idea for this book was originally formulated in March 2020, when, surprised by the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, we realized there was a unique opportunity to document the impact of the pandemic on people working in various parts of public welfare. The chapter introduces the focus of our field studies on workers who were acting in the shadow of the pandemic – that is, in areas of welfare that are not usually associated with professions and occupations fighting COVID-19 ‘on the front line’. As social scientists who had studied the Swedish public welfare sector for many years, we saw an opportunity to follow challenges and changes in work tasks and working conditions for teachers and healthcare professionals, as well as librarians, day-care staff, government investigators, municipal administrators and many other public sector workers.
During the pandemic, maintaining the activities that fall under the responsibility of libraries proved to be more than just a matter of finding alternative and/or ‘contagion-proof’ ways of lending books, organizing author presentations and ensuring access to essential information and knowledge. The news reports and librarians’ own stories presented in this chapter remind us that the library’s mission is much broader and that it is the foundation of many of the democratic processes on which our society is based.
Many of our interviewees talked about ‘working miracles’ when they described their situation during the pandemic. On the one hand, working during the pandemic was difficult and challenging; it almost took magic to overcome the challenges they faced. On the other hand, they were undoubtedly proud of what they had achieved. In this chapter, we summarize our interviewees’ description of their work under three themes: the relationship with digital tools, the positive and negative aspects of telework and the many and varied emotions the pandemic evoked. We present a general picture based on the accounts of people in some 30 different professions and occupations in Swedish public authorities and municipal welfare organizations. In the following part of the book, we describe experiences from three specific sectors: schools, libraries and courts.
During the second period of the pandemic, the new practices became part of the ‘new normal’. The key word was ‘adaptation’, as both organizations and their employees showed a great ability to transform their ways of working and an awareness of the need to do so. The stories from the public sector during this period and presented in this chapter are characterized by three themes: evaluation of the pandemic measures and their short- and long-term effects, increased media coverage of the pandemic and differences in the impact of the pandemic on different parts of the country.
The study on which this book is based explores how various professions/occupations in the public sector carried out their tasks in circumstances that were completely new. But we have also noticed that the extraordinary situation created by COVID-19 affected the relationship between professions closest to the core of welfare activities and the organizations that house their activities. This chapter therefore explores how the public sector was organized and governed in this dramatic and transformative period, and whether this sector, and the rest of society, have developed preparedness for future crises. What happens when ordinary economic, political and labour law conditions for public activities become limited or redefined? Were national and regional authorities, municipalities and welfare units still able to function in such extraordinary times?’ or ‘Did national and regional authorities, municipalities and welfare units have the capacity to function in such such extraordinary circumstances?
During the final period of the pandemic, the public debate centred on the long-term effects in different areas. While the focus was on mental health and post-COVID, the indirect effects on people’s working conditions also received attention, as the public debate and formal investigations turned towards those who had not been most affected by the pandemic. The chapter discusses how during this period, it also became increasingly clear that new variants of the virus would give the pandemic and the public sector’s response to it a wave-like character.
The design and implementation of welfare services is not only a question of how authorities, courts, schools, libraries and other state and municipal organizations are formally governed and organized. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly showed that in extraordinary circumstances, formal governance and organization have limited relevance for the maintenance of public sector functionality and democratic fundamentals. This maintenance and these fundamentals depend more on those who interpret what should be done in specific contexts, as well as when and how. The chapter introduces the notion of pandemicracy to refer to the specific form of governance in action that appear during the pandemic in the public sector and made public service provision possible.
To understand how the public welfare sector responded to the pandemic, it is first necessary to describe the conditions under which professions and occupations in this sector worked before COVID-19 struck. The review of previous research literature in this chapter indicates that the way in which state and municipal welfare organizations limited the use of employees’ professional knowledge and skills left little room for preparedness to act outside the framework of formal routines, structures and working methods.
The ability of schools to function during the pandemic required adjustments to the responsibilities and roles that teachers and school principals ascribed to their professional practice and profession. This chapter illustrates a number of areas where such adaptations were particularly evident and significant. Distance teaching, extension of responsibilities and redefinition of teachers’ identities are some of the examples.
