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I och med att Covid-19-pandemin tvingade många anställda att skifta arbetsplatsen från kontoret till hemmet, tycks stigmat kring distansarbete, och framför allt hemarbete, ha minskat. Med ett möjligt slut av pandemin i sikte är frågan hur (kontors-)arbetslivet kommer att se ut framöver: Vad behöver man tänka på när man som arbetsgivare och/eller HR person funderar kring om distans- och/eller hybridarbete ska bibehållas, utökas – eller avvecklas? För företag blir det nödvändigt att analysera och planera hur den nya post-Covid verksamheten ska utformas. Det är av vikt för företag att uppnå en ny status quo när framtidens arbetsplats planeras; målet behöver vara att hitta ett arbetssätt som är gynnsamt för både arbetsgivare och anställda, oavsett om det rör sig om kontors-, distans- eller hybridarbete. Denna rapport syftar till att redogöra för forskningsläget kring hem- och distansarbete för att ge de som planerar för framtiden ett beslutsstöd. Forskningssammanställningen gör inte anspråk på fullständighet då det i nuläget är för tidigt att dra slutsatser om världens förändring efter pandemin. Rapporten diskuterar flera relevanta aspekter och presenterar konkret tolv punkter som är av vikt för den som leder och fördelar arbetet, samt dess stödfunktioner, på ett företag.

We study the political opinions of Swedish social scientists in seven disciplines. A survey was sent to 4,301 academics at 25 colleges and universities, which makes the coverage of the disciplines included more or less comprehensive. When it comes to party sympathies there are 1.3 academics on the right for each academic on the left – a sharp contrast to the situation in the United States, where Democrats greatly dominate the social sciences. The corresponding ratio for Swedish citizens in general is 1.1. The most left-leaning disciplines are sociology and gender studies, the most right-leaning ones are business administration, economics, and law, with political science and economic history somewhere in between. The differences between the disciplines are smaller in Sweden than in the more polarized U.S. We also asked 14 policy questions. The replies largely confirm the pattern of a left-right divide – but overall the desire to change the status quo is tepid.

We study the political opinions of Swedish social scientists in seven disciplines. A survey was sent to 4,301 academics at 25 colleges and universities, which makes the coverage of the disciplines included more or less comprehensive. When it comes to party sympathies there are 1.3 academics on the right for each academic on the left – a sharp contrast to the situation in the United States, where Democrats greatly dominate the social sciences. The corresponding ratio for Swedish citizens in general is 1.1. The most left-leaning disciplines are sociology and gender studies, the most right-leaning ones are business administration, economics, and law, with political science and economic history somewhere in between. The differences between the disciplines are smaller in Sweden than in the more polarized U.S. We also asked 14 policy questions. The replies largely confirm the pattern of a left-right divide – but overall the desire to change the status quo is tepid.

In a recent Public Opinion Quarterly article “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,” John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick pit themselves against “right-wing activists and scholars,” citing our scholarship (Klein and Stern 2005a; Klein and Western 2005). Here we analyze Zipp and Fenwick’s characterization of our research and find it faulty in three important respects. We then turn to their “liberal v. conservative” findings and show they concord with our analysis. If one feels that it is a problem that humanities and social science faculty at four-year colleges and universities are vastly predominantly Democratic voters, mostly with what may called establishment-left or progressive views, then such concerns should not be allayed by Zipp and Fenwick’s article. This Reply was submitted to Public Opinion Quarterly on October 16, 2006, except that the submission did not include the Summary and without Appendix 1 that appear here at the end of the paper.

People often suppose or imply that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists. We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data is broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Republican). Even the average Republican AEA member is “middle-of-theroad,” not free-market. We offer several possible explanations of the apparent difference between actual and attributed views.

This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians.

In this paper we address the free-rider prob1em from a network perspective. We suggest that individuals' groups of relevant others are considerably smaller than is usually assumed in the Olsonian tradition. Instead of focusing on the interest group as a whole, we argue that a group of relevant others consists of those to whom the individual is tied through various social bonds. Since these groups tend to be small, social selective incentives are líkely to be efficient in inducing individual participation. In testing these ideas empirically, we use microdata on members of a Swedish temperance movement organization during the period of 1896-1937. We estímate how individuals' groups of relevant others are composed with respect to membership in the rnovement organization and how the composition of the groups affects indiViduals' decisions to join the movement organization. The results of the analysis support our thesis that additional movement members in the g·roup of relevant others increase an individual's propensity to join a social movement organization. However, the results also lend support to Olson's free-rider thesis: When controlling for the composition of the group of relevant others, additional members in the movement as a whole decrease an individual 's propensity to join the movement.