Jacqueline O’Reilly’s research while affiliated with University of Sussex and other places

The coronavirus pandemic provoked worldwide changes to the workplace, leading to rapid changes in lifestyles and working conditions. While organizations and governments struggled to develop regulations and policies, individuals were forced to find ways to manage work and life. During the pandemic and quarantine, a group of knowledge workers from around the world convened virtually and agreed to use qualitative autoethnographic methods to study how the quarantine disrupted their conventional patterns of work and care. In this article, we apply two communication perspectives—uncertainty reduction theory and resilience— to participant diaries to understand how participants represent internal and external stressors, the efforts diarists employed to overcome those stressors, and their varying success in doing so. Post-hoc application of these communication concepts suggests that the diarists, though privileged in some ways, were not exempt from the social, professional, and emotional consequences of the pandemic and that their efforts to enact resilience were unevenly successful, especially in relation to their use of communications technology. Diarists reported struggling with uncertainty at numerous levels and that uncertainty contributed to individual emotional and cultural distress. Disruptions to work, home, and communities significantly affected wellbeing and ability to cope with challenges. Added to this were the complex and competing roles that diarists felt as they struggled to work from home, parent, and remain engaged.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about a number of partly improvised, partly only temporary, but in every respect diverse and often unprecedented social policy measures in Europe. The edited volume provides an encompassing and longer-term analysis of social policy responses during the COVID-19 crisis in order to ask in which direction the European welfare states on the one hand, and EU social policy on the other hand, are developing as a result of the pandemic with respect to polity, politics, and policy instruments. The book focuses on the tension between continuity and change from different interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Contributions range from single case studies to comparative policy analyses. The chapters in this book study (1) welfare state change during the pandemic in order to contribute to welfare state and regime theory; (2) policy responses in specific social policy domains, their socio-structural effects for particular social groups; and their potential future effects on the social security systems in different countries; and (3) social policymaking as a multilevel process, analyzing different crises responses and discussing the implications for European integration and EU social policy. Overall, the different social policy areas, European countries, and social groups studied in this volume show not only that the welfare state is here to stay, but also that social policy may potentially develop and expand its competences at the European level.

The COVID lockdowns were characterised by new forms of governmentality as lives were disrupted and controlled through the vertical transmission of biopolitics by the state. The paper considers how this was experienced by academics in 11 different countries through analysis of diaries written during the first lockdown. The paper asks if communities can offer an alternative to governmentality by looking at three levels: the national, the neighbourhood and the personal. Whilst at a national level the idea of community was instrumentalised to encourage compliance to extraordinary measures, at the local level community compassion through helping neighbours encouraged horizontal connections that could offer a “space” within the dominant logic of governmentality. At the level of personal communities, the digitalisation of social relationships helped to create supportive networks over widely dispersed areas but these were narrowly rather than widely focused, avoiding critical discussion.