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.
As the previous chapter outlined, the most significant ‘event’ of the 21st century has the potential to drastically change the political, economic and social coordinates of the world. While some scholarship has been erudite, linking the micro to the macro and speculating on what the future political economy will look like (for example: Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020; Primrose et al, 2020; Saad-Filho, 2020; Scambler, 2020; Sumonja, 2020), other social scientific work is often theoretically and/or empirically absent. Although space constrains how much literature we were able to review, in our critical analysis of some of the work devoted to capturing, understanding and conceptualising how COVID-19 is affecting us and changing society, we suggest they fall into one of the following categories or, in some cases, a combination of studies/commentaries which:
Handwash social harm – endorse central ideological messaging associated with COVID-19 such as the lockdown and downplay the resultant social harm.
Represent empirical curfews – fail to step outside their discipline, romanticise reality and impose deaptive theories like moral panic. These works lack depth in capturing people’s experiential realities during the pandemic and are often empirically limited.
Disinfect reality – do not place reality within its macro political-economic context and provide snapshot efforts to dissect social feeling/experience into measurable variables and graphs.
Reflect an academic lockdown – are not studies but commentaries alluding to the glorification of the author’s hobby or previous publications.
In the final days of 2019, reports emerged from Wuhan in China that a new strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) had been detected. Within weeks it became apparent that asymptomatic human-to-human transmission was possible and that a major pandemic could be about to unfold. According to the World Health Organization (2021), by late April 2021, over 150 million people worldwide had been infected with COVID-19 and over 3.1 million deaths had been attributed to the disease. In the intervening period, day-to-day life changed so dramatically for people around the world that it is hardly controversial to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic represents the most significant event since the Second World War. While the extent and nature of nation states’ responses to the pandemic have varied, most societies have undertaken social distancing measures; adopted the use of face coverings; imposed national lockdowns; and forced businesses to close, which collectively have had a considerable impact upon social life.
Nation states have been required to intervene in their respective economies on a scale that is without precedent in recent history through the offering of loans, tax relief and furlough schemes to cover a proportion of workers’ salaries. At the onset of the pandemic, supply chains failed, in the UK there were accusations of government corruption in the procurement of essential services, while surveillance technologies, such as test and trace apps, have proliferated and expanded. Workers – who were able to do so – have had to shift to online working and with the closure of schools, colleges and university campuses, so have many children and young people, positioning domestic dwellings as the epicentre of work, familial and social life for many.
When we reflect on COVID-19 and the lockdown restrictions enacted around the world, it is inevitable that some people will have experienced a ‘good lockdown’ in the way that some participants in the previous century’s defining moments, the two world wars, spoke of enjoying a ‘good war’. Time to stop and reflect, identify priorities, learn a new skill, spend more time with family, work from home, enjoy Zoom quizzes. They will come out of this crisis financially better off, professionally secure and emotionally centred. For them, the world post-COVID-19 will likely be one of opportunity and advancement. However, the rich empirical data presented in this book show that these experiences speak to privileges not afforded to all. The world into which COVID-19 emerged was one of heightened inequality, increasing polarisation and tension, and a growing post-social arrangement whereby the challenge of social cohesion was fraught with difficulty. The pandemic has exacerbated many of these tensions and created new ones. New social divisions appear, and new fault lines represent challenges that will define the coming era. Social inequalities have grown, both economically and culturally, as some elites have enjoyed unprecedented growth in wealth, the ranks of unemployed in Western economies swell with each business failure and high-street closure. Elsewhere, in poorer developing nations, the pandemic has burdened states lacking adequate healthcare provisions and with considerable numbers of citizens that rely on the informal economy for work.
In challenging social science’s established orthodoxies, this first in a series of books is a call for its disciplines to embrace new theoretical paradigms and research methods to better understand the reality of life in a post-COVID world.
By offering a detailed insight into the harmful effects of neoliberalism before the pandemic, as well as the intervallic period the world is currently living through, the authors show how it is more important than ever for social science to evolve and take a leading role in contextualising the biggest crisis of the 21st century.
This is a critical blueprint for ongoing debates about the COVID-19 pandemic and alternative modes of research.
As Rhodes and Lancaster (2020: 177) highlight, ‘public health emergencies are rarely studied as they happen. But they should be’, and this is what we have tried to do: document what is happening at each stage of the evolving pandemic. Though ambitious in its design, we wanted to find out how this was affecting citizens globally to consider how the pandemic was – and still is – not only exacerbating neoliberalism’s existing inequalities, but potentially reshaping society’s political, economic and social institutions as well as our subjective outlooks. There was no time to wait for a funding call and continue along further bureaucratic pathways should project finance emerge. We are experienced researchers who were faced with a unique opportunity to research the most significant event so far of the 21st century and had to act quickly. Therefore, we wasted no time in devising our research tools and immediately set about our study.
The aims of this study were to understand people’s experiences of this unique global event and to chart how COVID-19 is reshaping social life and society. To do this, it adopted a flexible inductive approach which allocated different research methods to consider what we identify as three stages in the development of the pandemic. The initial stage examined the first lockdown experienced by over 100 countries. This was followed by the emergence of what was broadly termed by global entities – and in tandem with the World Health Organization (WHO) – as the ‘new normal’.
Viral pandemics are nothing new and throughout history have generated significant social distress and suffering. Perhaps the most devastating pandemic in recent history was the 1918 Spanish influenza, since it possessed a fatality rate of around 10% and killed over 40 million people worldwide. Thereafter, the 1968 Hong Kong flu also generated considerable social chaos across the globe, being associated with over one million fatalities. The 2009 swine flu pandemic lasted for nearly two years, and by comparison generated far fewer deaths than the Spanish influenza and Hong Kong flu, killing around 280,000 people. Yet since then, scientists have persistently warned about the potential for another global pandemic, in particular virologists, who claimed that climate change, global urbanisation and the interconnected nature of a globalised world could produce the right elements for rapid human-to-human transmission should a virus emerge (Žižek, 2020). Such warnings, however, largely fell on deaf ears among the global political elite. Combined with neoliberalism’s structural conditions outlined in the previous chapter, many nations were left radically underprepared for the outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019.
Importantly, in the early period of 2020, the virus was spreading quickly, and generally the elderly or already vulnerable were dying at a fast rate. This set governments and the media into a frenzy as there was no known cure or remedy and no vaccine (Blakeley, 2020). Little was known about how the virus was transmitted and while large numbers of extremely sick patients were admitted to hospitals, some recovered quickly while others were unaffected by it.
