The idea for this book was first articulated on 21 March 2020. The idea arose partly from our own sense of inadequacy: as Swedish citizens, we wanted to do something meaningful in the fight against COVID-19. But as researchers, we also realized there was a unique opportunity to document the pandemic’s impact on people working in various parts of society. In particular, we thought about the people who were seen as working in the shadow of the pandemic – in the areas of the welfare state that are not usually associated with professions and occupations fighting COVID-19 ‘on the front line’. As social scientists who have studied the Swedish public welfare sector for many years, we saw an opportunity to observe how work tasks and working conditions were being challenged and changed while the virus was spreading in society. These challenges and changes not only concerned healthcare professionals but also teachers, librarians, childcare staff, government investigators, municipal administrators and many other professional groups in this sector.
Our feelings and ambitions were not unique. The journalistic and scientific production of articles and news reports from both outside and within the public sector began to emerge almost simultaneously with the first confirmed cases in Sweden. One national newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published a series of reports titled ‘Key workers’, another, Svenska Dagbladet, ‘A month in intensive care’; Swedish television broadcast Stories from the Frontline, and the evening paper Expressen published a series of articles under the heading ‘Inside the pandemic’. These texts and features provided close insights into the work and working environment of welfare professionals (especially those working in health and elderly care). They were soon joined by other newspapers and magazines which quickly adapted their editorial work to cover the pandemic and its progress through public and private Sweden (Ghersetti and Odén, 2021).
Alongside journalistic efforts, COVID-related stories began to take the form of books and reports from within the welfare sector itself. In 2021, the think tank Arena Idé published a report entitled ‘On the front line
These articles, reports and books emphasized how strenuous and exhausting working conditions were for care workers, teachers, gravediggers and cleaners, among many other public sector workers. They also stressed the importance of the work that people in various welfare professions and occupations do for patients, passengers, parents and relatives: all that ‘work we have taken for granted’, to quote the former president of Kommunal, Tobias Baudin.1
Our academic colleagues also quickly produced and disseminated knowledge about the new virus and its impact on the public sector and those working in publicly funded welfare organizations. A Google Scholar search for ‘Sweden, COVID-19, public sector, working conditions and professions’ in 2020 produced over 100 scientific articles and reports and close to 1,000 in the next two years.2 Given the slow review and publication processes in academia, these figures alone show just how intensive work efforts were, as well as the extent of the research interest in the pandemic’s consequences for the Swedish public sector. Yet a review of these studies showed that this interest was somewhat limited in its focus and scope. Although there were some studies of working conditions in publicly funded activities such as transport, culture, libraries and the court system, the focus was primarily on healthcare, elderly care and schools. Most studies were also geographically limited to the metropolitan regions.
It is easy to understand why much of the research published during this period was relatively brief and episodic in nature. More in-depth studies of the pandemic’s long-term effects and how it affected public sector professions and occupations can only be produced now the pandemic has ended. But regardless of the scope and quality of the studies carried out, they showed clearly that there were no areas where the pandemic had not changed the working lives of everyone whose work ensures that the Swedish welfare system continues to deliver services to ten and a half million people every day. The most notable changes were, of course, those related to the digitalization of everything from doctors’ appointments to food inspections, and to the enforced transition to remote work.
Against this background, one might ask what three organization scholars can contribute to a still ongoing, rich and intense public and academic debate. We hope that our contribution is closely related to our speciality: we study how public sector organizations, and the various professional groups working there, are governed and managed and how they plan, organize and carry out their activities. To approach how people in the Swedish welfare sector have dealt with the impact of the pandemic on their work and their workplaces, we formulated the following goals:
to pay attention to the work of the professionals who worked ‘behind the scenes’ (not ‘on the front line’) of the pandemic;
to pay attention to the work of these professionals in both large and small municipalities;
to observe if, and in such cases how, the work of these professionals has changed over the course of the pandemic;
to establish whether people in various occupational groups have been able to influence their organizations and their working environments to help them deal with the pandemic;
to reflect on the potential effects of all these experiences on the management of future crises.
A book is born – about our study, our field material and our way of writing
On 23 March 2020, amid the first wave of the pandemic, we sent out a request – via social media, on our respective university websites and through personal contacts – to various authorities, municipalities and state-owned companies asking if anybody was interested in participating in our study. We explained that we were looking for material that would help us understand how the working life of public sector employees had changed during the first period of COVID-19. The response was more meagre than we expected. We had probably underestimated the time and, above all, the energy it takes to reflect daily on one’s own work situation and to document these thoughts. Nevertheless, we received quite a few observations in the form of written
We conducted our first interviews in early June 2020 and continued interviewing during the summer and autumn of that year. The focus of these interviews was on the relationship between changes in the organization, management and implementation of work tasks and the increased – or decreased – scope of responsibility and autonomy bestowed on professional groups during the initial months of the pandemic (Dimond, 2021). Our questions were primarily designed to help us understand the challenges our interviewees faced in their work during the first months of the pandemic, if and how they confronted these challenges and what support they received from their colleagues, managers and regional and state authorities. We also asked how our interviewees chose which aspects of their work to prioritize; how did they feel, and how did they manage their emotions? These interviews, together with the self-reported narratives, account for about half of the material. In total, between March and October 2020 we collected 35 testimonies from persons working in municipalities – in particular municipal welfare services – state-owned companies, regional councils, central authorities and political parties.
After analysing this material (which we reported on in our chapter ‘Pandemicracy and organizing in unsettling times’3), we realized that the pandemic not only posed challenges to various parts of the public sector and to various professions and occupations but that there were also geographical variations in how these challenges were perceived and managed. We have summarized our reflections as follows:
There was a wide variation of changes in the working lives of different occupations and professions. This variation seemed to depend partly on professional and geographical distance from the pandemic.
Some public sector organizations focused on their core mission and activities (at least at the beginning of the pandemic), while others increased the number and kind of their procedures and control measures (usually in compliance with pandemic-related measures).
Professional expertise was central to many COVID-19-related actions, but it was also combined with commitment, emotional involvement and ‘activism’, which sometimes challenged traditional professional-administrative structures and practices.
The everyday work of public servants was seriously affected by the international and national media attention and the disseminated images of Sweden and its pandemic strategy.
Professional work was the main factor in the relatively high resilience to the effects of the pandemic, thanks to which public sector organizations were largely able to continue their activities, albeit in modified forms. There was also a ‘bouncing back effect’: when the reaction to the crisis had stabilized, there was a strong desire to return to the pre-crisis state among both managers and practitioners.
Thus, we decided that in our further work we would focus on differences between various occupational groups and between geographical areas. At the end of October 2020, we applied for a grant from the think tank Ada Försäkring. In the application, we explained that our main purpose was to study how various occupational groups and professions that were operating ‘behind the front line’ (the pandemic), and in more peripheral localities, managed their work. We intended to include three types of professions and occupations:
Occupations and professions that were directly exposed to the effects of the pandemic, such as those in healthcare. These would serve as a reference point to better understand the work of professionals and other employees working under different circumstances and conditions.
Occupations and professions that were indirectly affected by the pandemic, but where these secondary effects were still significant (for example, teachers, childcare staff, social workers, military and emergency services staff).
Occupations and professions working with issues relatively distant from the areas affected by the pandemic, but which had been reorganized in the shadow of the pandemic (for example, social services administrators, family counsellors, counsellors, librarians and publicly funded culture workers).
We selected interviewees among professionals from both large and small municipalities. We also attempted to cover most of the country, as the geographical location was clearly one of the aspects that affected the working conditions of certain professions and occupations and the ability of their members to devote themselves to the tasks and assignments they were responsible for.
In our grant application, we also argued that many professions and occupations in our public sector have in recent decades been affected by major political reforms, resulting in increased demands for efficiency, reporting and thus tighter control, as well as a zeal for evaluation (Blomgren and Waks, 2017). At the same time, public sector organizations were subject to an influx of various governance and management ideas from the private sector. These reforms had positive and negative effects for both users and staff, but they have undoubtedly limited the autonomy of welfare staff
Referring to our analysis of the field material from 2020, we therefore raised the question of whether pandemic-related measures undertaken in the public sector were related to working methods and forms of governance that have become popular in the aftermath of what is usually called New Public Management. Thus, our project might also be relevant for political discussions about how the Swedish public sector should be governed to strengthen its resilience to future risks and threats.
Zooming, travelling and observing remotely
In December 2020, we were informed that our application had been approved, and we started the second phase of the project. We began by contacting municipalities that might be interested in participating in the project. These were municipalities that met our requirements in terms of size and geographical spread, and where the municipal leaders would help us contact employees in various municipal welfare organizations. As we were still in a pandemic and had a long way to go before large parts of the population received their first dose of vaccine, we used Zoom as our main tool. When the vaccination programme started on a larger scale in the spring of 2021, we were able to go out and hold some interviews face-to-face, albeit to a limited extent. Still, between April 2021 and June 2022 we had the opportunity to conduct interviews and visit five municipalities.
During this period, we conducted 40 interviews with people working in different areas of municipal welfare and visited each of the five municipalities at least once. Such two- to three-day visits were intended to give us a better understanding of the various workplaces described in the interviews. Before each visit, we read newspaper articles in the local press, official statistics, websites, reports and other documents to give us a picture of the issues and challenges that each municipality had faced.
As the welfare activities in the municipalities visited were generally spread over a large geographical area, and as the time was not yet ripe for travelling on public transport, our main mode of transport was the car. As well as giving us the opportunity to visit workplaces that were far away from the town centre, we were also allowed, on several occasions, to visit people in their home offices, to accompany them on assignments such as environmental inspections and to witness the difficulties of crossing the then closed border between Sweden and Norway. During our stays, we were also able to visit the often empty municipal libraries, browse municipal information material while sitting in the receptions of the municipal administrations and enter health centres and care homes wearing face masks. We were also allowed to sit in classrooms furnished with protective measures against COVID-19
Writing a story about working in the shadow of the pandemic
Combined with the first interviews, our material includes 57 interviews from nine municipalities, 11 interviews from seven state authorities and seven interviews with staff in regional and state organizations.
The interviews in municipalities were conducted with officials who held various administrative functions, such as case officers, unit and IT managers and committee secretaries, and within a wide range of public organizations, such as schools, social services, libraries, local authorities and primary care centres. The municipalities included in the project differed in size from very small (a few thousand inhabitants) to some of the largest in the country. They are geographically dispersed across Sweden from north to south and from west to east and have been affected by COVID-19 at different times and with different consequences for their population, economy, culture and governance.
Among the 11 government officials we interviewed, some worked in the armed forces, others in the higher education sector and still others in the migration authority. At regional and state level, we spoke mainly to healthcare professionals, as well as to employees from a state-owned company, a museum and the Swedish Parliament. Overall, our material includes interviews with people from the following occupations and professions:
asylum officers
building inspectors
business developers
chairpersons of municipal boards
council and municipal secretaries
doctors
educators
employment officers
environmental and health protection inspectors
environmental managers
family counsellors
head teachers
heads of units for child and youth services
information advisors
IT managers librarians
municipal directors
nurses
personnel managers
politicians
public health coordinators
researchers
social coordinators
social secretaries
social services managers
teachers
technical administrators
university lecturers
youth workers
We also invited two of our colleagues who study libraries and courtrooms to add their reflections on the changes provoked by COVID-19. The reason we chose to include these two chapters is that they explicitly confirm what we have found in our own material, but in much more detail. What we wanted to illustrate was that the pandemic also impacted work in the Swedish public sector in terms of society’s core democratic processes, principles and values. We realized that certain aspects of Swedish democracy were challenged, and in some respects even limited, when municipal administrations, schools and libraries adapted their activities to the progress of the pandemic, and that this democratic deficit deserved special attention. Our colleagues’ methods are specified in the Appendices.
All field material presented in this book has been anonymized to protect the personal integrity of those who have chosen to share their stories and to assure them that they cannot be identified. Although we informed our interlocutors both in speech and in writing of the purpose and design of the project, stressing that our aim was not to evaluate either them or their organizations, it was at times noticeable that they wondered how open they could be. We assured them that all material would be anonymized, that original recordings would be deleted after transcription and that they could withdraw their participation at any time during the study. When processing our material, we have therefore tried, as far as possible, to remove all information that could be used to identify individuals, workplaces and organizations.
The structure of the book
As we explained in the Preface, this book is intended to serve as a contemporary document showing how the pandemic has come to affect
In the next chapter, we place our study in a broader context of general studies of the pandemic, to which we return in the two concluding chapters. The main part of the book contains an interpreted documentation of how welfare work was organized during the pandemic in which we weave together a chronological structure with thematic presentations, identifying some central themes of ‘pandemic work’. Chapters 3–6 describe in chronological order the work of civil servants during the pandemic as a journey from ‘the extraordinary’ to ‘the new normal’. Chapter 7 focuses on the role of digitalization of work, as this was a key metamorphosis that state and municipal organizations and their staff underwent during the pandemic. In Chapter 8, we describe how pandemic-related problems and solutions were handled in our schools. Chapter 9, authored by Signe Jernberg, describes the peculiarities of Swedish libraries, showing their important democratic mission that was first challenged and then managed during the pandemic. In Chapter 10, Charlotta Kronblad shows what happens when institutional forms for the exercise of justice must move to digital courtrooms.
In the book’s penultimate chapter (11), we apply an organizational and governance perspective to analyse changes in the relationship between state and regional authorities and municipalities on the one hand and public sector staff on the other, under the extraordinary conditions created by the pandemic. The last chapter (12) presents our idea of ‘pandemicracy’ in the hope that it will become a starting point for further discussions about the necessity for new forms of governance and organization in the public sector. The concept of pandemicracy attempts to cover both the ways in which the pandemic has affected the formal organization and governance of the welfare sector (bureaucracy) and the ways in which the public sector fulfils its societal mission (democracy). In the Epilogue, we suggest how experiences from the pandemic can be used in a discussion on what future welfare could, should and is likely to be.
