This article examines the intersection of three key developments in global north societies: the growing emphasis on (in)security and fear of crime, the expansion and pluralization of policing, and the increasing digitalization of crime policy arenas. Focusing on the implementation of “System X”, a leading Swedish crime prevention technology, this study explores how these trends manifest in daily municipal work. Employing the concepts of articulation work and sociotechnical imaginaries, the analysis reveals how expectations of System X are socialized and materialized in practice.

Findings demonstrate that public officials legitimize System X by contrasting its promise of future evidence-based crime prevention with a rejected “unsystematic past”. Their daily often extremely time-consuming work, navigating both practical challenges and expectations of new technological solutions, reinforces their commitment through discursive and material vouching for System X. This implementation process involves a dialectic of anticipation and everyday challenges, with broader securitization discourses driving fear of crime, simultaneously capitalizing on techno-optimism. Challenges in this way constitute a presupposition for the work in that they legitimize the relevance of imagining the systematic future.

As a sociotechnical imaginary, security technologies like System X intersects with larger worldmaking and wider trends in plural policing and security markets. The implementation requires the public officials to exist in the past, present and future simultaneously, transforming imagined goals into meaningful present-day practices. This dynamic underscores the need for critical analyses of how optimism-driven technology co-exist with, and potentially obscures the complex realities it aims to address.

Varför påstår människor saker om hur tillståndet i samhället är och borde vara? Mot vilken bakgrund görs anspråk på att veta vilken väg som är den rätta? I Den svenska berusningspolitken under­söker författarna detta genom att gräva djupt i över hundra års historia. Vi får följa ­utvecklingen från förbuds­omröstningar, forskning, styrning, experimen­tell ­narkotikaförskrivning till nu­tidens debatter om Systembolagets framtid. Dessa exempel belyser hur Sveriges restriktiva syn på berusningsmedel har varit allt annat än enhetlig. Innovativa lösningar har prövats och berusnings­problemet har betraktats på olika sätt beroende på substans och tidens normer. Boken visar att kunskap oavsett om den är erövrad, påstådd eller erfaren ofta gynnar dem som har en agenda för sitt agerande, vilket synliggör att kunskapsbaserad ­politik ofta består av politikbaserad ­kunskap. Det här är en bok som manar till eftertanke om hur vi hanterar kunskap om berusning och samhälle.

Background

In 2018, the planned opening of a second Needle and Syringe Exchange Program (NSP) unit in Stockholm, Sweden, was stopped with reference to protests from the public. Local Stockholm media cited stakeholders who claimed that the initiative was led by politicians with “zero knowledge about what makes citizens upset” and referred to reported public concern over a preschool located near the planned NSP unit. This case highlights the significant role of the public – and the idea of public opinion – in relation to political and medial aspects of alcohol and other drug (AOD) issues. Our aim is to scrutinize how “the public” is produced in local print media reports on harm reduction measures such as the NSP, to illuminate how these representations operate and what reality/ies they co-produce.

Methods

We analyzed 171 articles reporting on harm reduction in local Stockholm print media from 2012 to 2023. The themes identified in the analysis emerged from a combination of data-driven empirical observations and a theory-driven approach grounded in the influential literature on publics and counterpublics by Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser.

Results

The overarching articulation in the material is that of a singular and homogeneous public. Public opinion regarding local experiences of individual drug use and harm reduction is depicted as being driven by fear and worry over living alongside “messy others”, thereby producing a public of worried local community witnesses. This production of the public takes on two different meanings depending on the narrative of the articles: 1) as righteous and entitled, 2) as ignorant and irrational. As a result, the public comes to operate as either a consulted public deserving consideration in the implementation of harm reduction policies or as an uneducated political obstacle to change. Consequently, the public is assigned both a counterpublic and a dominant public identity.

Conclusions

When the representation of the worried public is repeatedly echoed by the media, it becomes hard to ignore in policy-making processes. The implications of such media representations are significant, as they risk disguising the complex nature of publics as a diverse group of individuals while reproducing taken-for-granted ideas about local communities opposing harm reduction measures. In addition, the appropriation of a counterpublic identity narrows the discursive space for action. Taken together, the repetition of a singular worried public and the appropriation of the counterpublic position make it nearly impossible to imagine alternative public responses to harm reduction. As a consequence, this can limit well-needed policy responses to AOD issues.

Background: The Swedish political system is based on a strong tradition of commissions of inquiry, which work over the long-term to develop knowledge-based policy. This study explores knowledge processes associated with the work of such commissions, focusing on the case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system. The point of departure is the 1944 Temperance Committee and its internal committee work, the committee's reports, and also the resulting governmental bill that led to the abolition of the rationing system in 1955. The focus is directed at how the public was used in arguments for and against the abolition of the system.

Methods: The article adds to studies of knowledge production in policy by presenting a case study of the various ways in which the arguments used in political processes rely on the public as a carrying infrastructure over the course of a political process. We use the concept of the infrastructure (Star, 1999) as a metaphor to engage with the way the public is taken for granted in policy processes, and with the discursive resources needed to move arguments forward within a political process.

Results: Political processes involve many activities related to the movement of knowledge, of which we have explored the use of the public as an activity required for the movement of arguments. The public is understood as providing both conversational and legalistic resources for moving arguments from one context to another. While the internal committee documents and the final bill allowed for an everyday use of the public in relation to arguments on hassle, annoyance and freedom, the committee reports combined the use of the public with formal arguments on legal processes and the public's sense of justice.

Conclusion: Explanations of the movement of knowledge often miss the articulation work (Star, 1991) that takes place within policy processes. The public is indirectly present, as well-behaving witnesses used to emphasize arguments, and as such, they do plenty of work. At the same time, it is the committee documents that facilitate the presence of this public, which often lie far from the publics’ actual potential to make their voices heard. Although a perception of the rationing system's lack of support in popular opinion constituted a backdrop to the work of the committee, there was little knowledge of the publics’ actual views on the rationing system. We show that the public constitute a spoken rather than a material resource that proves quite effective: the public is rarely questioned as long as it is a restricted singular public that behaves well. To date, little attention has been focused on understanding the role of the everyday actors in relation to alcohol policy and other forms of drug policy. We argue that research needs to engage more with the way publics are allowed to indirectly or directly participate in policy processes and what knowledge and policy consequences this participation produces.

Aim: The aim is to study non-governmental actors’ production and use of alcohol policy knowledge in the early 20th and the 21st century respectively, by analyzing their main arguments, knowledge substantiation and their overarching discursive legitimacy. Design: The first impact focuses on prohibitionist-critical actors’ engagement against the alcohol ban in the years 1916–1922. The second impact focuses on the Swedish think tank Timbro’s engagement in alcohol policy in the years 2012–2020. The analysis of the two empirical cases was based on an open coding strategy with a focus on what type of knowledge claims that were made and how which reasoning was put forward in relation to these. Results: Great similarities are distinguished between the two timeperiods. Alcohol is an issue of freedom and at the same time a threat of crucial importance for the future society. The arguments are supported by historical, international, media and scientific evidence. The biggest difference lies in the legitimization of the argumentation. In the early 20th century this is rooted in democracy and the will of the people while the arguments of the 21st century are rooted in public health and governmentally sanctioned knowledge. Conclusion:The knowledge processes are explored as matters of political appropriation that takes place through processes of directing and stealing the spotlight. These processes show how the aspiring democracy and the existing public health policy respectively are productive preconditions for what kind of knowledge that can be brought forward. This enables a renegotiation regarding what democracy and public health policy can involve.

Sweden and the other Nordic countries have held an alternative way to many other countries of understanding and responding to substance use and addiction. The non-medical approach grew particularly strong in the 1960s, but this social perspective has, since the 1990s, become increasingly challenged. This chapter outlines the social understanding and the developments within substance use treatment (SUT), policy, and everyday society in Sweden. A renewed medicalization began at the turn of the millennium, and has accelerated in more recent years, increasingly so due to an underlying brain disease model of addiction (BDMA) and sometimes also by outspoken BDMA arguments. Some explanations for the BDMA’s entry into the Nordic non-medical stronghold are: the medical perspective embedded in both evidence-based practices (EBP) and New Public Management (NPM), and the related fragmentation of the treatment system and demands for cost-effectiveness, communication and public outreach. Explanations are also found in worldwide trends, e.g., a mainstreaming of diagnoses; the public health movement; drug-related deaths and a push towards medical harm reduction measures; and, most recently, by a BDMA rhetoric emerging in public and policy debate and SUT. Understood from processes of ‘copresence’ and ‘vaguification’, the BDMA is in line with these forces driving towards a biomedical understanding of substance use problems.

Vetenskap syftar till att säkra kunskap, men är samtidigt en osäker process. Det märks exempelvis om man skärskådar relationen mellan vetenskap och politik i den svenska välfärdsstaten. I detta häfte undersöks och diskuteras utifrån ett vetenskapshistoriskt perspektiv hur berusningspolitiken utformades och begripliggjordes under 1960- och 1970-talen. Särskild vikt läggs vid den betydelse som statistiska kvantifieringar kom att få för att etablera kunskap.

Online contexts offer an important source of information and emotional support for those facing involuntary childlessness. This article reports the results from an ethnographic exploration of TTC (trying-to-conceive) communication on Instagram. Through a new materialist approach that pays attention to the web of intra-acting agencies in online communication, this article explores the question of what material-discursive bodies (constructs of embodiment and medical information) emerge in TTC communication as the result of shared images and narratives of bodies, symptoms, fertility treatments, and reproductive technologies. Drawing on a lengthy ethnographic immersion, observations of 394 Instagram accounts, and the close analysis of 100 posts, the study found that TTC communication produces collective, unruly, and becoming bodies. Collective bodies reflect collectively acquired, solidified, and contested medical knowledge and bodies produced in TTC communication. Unruly bodies are bodies that do not conform to standard medical narratives. Becoming bodies are marked by their shifting agency, such as pregnant or fetal bodies.

This study investigates the interaction between civil servants and politicians in a planning committee in a Swedish county council. As the committees are venues for preparation of future decision-making, civil servants and others are invited to inform and report to the politicians on different topics. The aim is to explore this local interaction process based on an analysis of requests and responses. It is shown that the communication between civil servants and politicians is pervaded by sociability in the form of conversational routines. The article aims to recognize this sociability as an intrinsic part of knowledge coproduction processes. Civil servants and politicians negotiate different types of professional and common knowledge through routines that dislocate time, responsibility, roles, and protocol order. These lubricants – important but often circumvented in studies of policy-making – are explored as instances of conversational coproduction.

The coproduction idiom within Science and Technology Studies (STS) centers on how science and society produce knowledge together. The current thesis explores expert communication – which is immersed in the relationship between science and society – as a case for understanding such coproducing processes. Expert communication is often characterized as a democratic initiative of knowledge enlightenment. But we know less about the consequences that communication initiatives bring. For instance, while groups of publics and experts are large and heterogeneous, expert communication often involves simplified and dichotomized relationships between these groups. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practice of expert communication in terms of how expertise is communicated and received. Who gets to represent experts and publics, in what ways and in which situations, and how do they engage with expertise?

Expert communication takes place in all kinds of fields. The focus of this thesis is communication of addiction expertise. The addiction field makes a suitable case for studying co-constitutive practices of communication, as it is broad and disparate, and filled with different contradictory perspectives, actors and relations. The current study explores communication of addiction expertise through three cases that involve different types of experts and publics, as well as different dimensions of the expert/public relationships and of communication as a process of coproduction: Newspaper readers’ interpretations of media representations of biomedical addiction expertise, conference participants’ collaboration within a conference on codependency, and civil servants’ and politicians’ interaction within county council committee meetings. Drawing on STS approaches of coproduction of knowledge and classical sociological conversation analysis, the thesis explores questions of how, what, and whose knowledge is communicated and received, and what activities and actors are involved in these processes. A specific focus is put on how sociability in the form of conversational routines is productive, as sociability carries expertise and establishes relations between actors involved in coproducing processes of communication.

Publics are not only recipients of expertise but also active enablers of how expertise comes into being in the everyday society, as publics engage with expertise through filtering and intertwining expertise through and with their personal experiences. Expertise, at least regarding human and social activities such as addiction, is thus bound to everyday experiences and lives. It is also shown how certain expertise, certain experiences, and certain actors and victims of addiction related problems are included while others are excluded. For example, biomedical explanations such as the reward system and the brain disease model seem to co-exist well with peoples’ personal experiences in contrast to social scientific explanations. Moreover, certain actors manage to draw on personal experiences in multiple roles as both experts and publics. Introducing the concept of conversational coproduction, the studies also highlight the sociability and conversational routines involved in expert communication as crucial for (de)establishing relations and making expertise flow or freeze in local coproducing processes as well as for understanding consequences of expert communication and its relation to public participation and democracy.