The art of being governed: the implementation of Covid-19 policies in Swedish on-license alcohol service

ABSTRACT

The licensed serving of alcoholic beverages is an important institutional aspect of food culture. In Sweden, the Government’s policies to battle the Covid-19 pandemic meant further restrictions, including a temporary law, to mitigate contagion at licensed restaurants, bars, producers’ tasting events, etc. This paper inquiries into the “art” exercised by managers of such businesses, already used to strict governance, of “being governed” when faced with these new and sudden policies. The study draws on Swedish Covid-19 policy and interviews with managers of licensed premises and a municipal auditor during the three months of the most far-reaching restrictions. By analyzing these materials through anthropological theories of state governance, the paper shows how Covid-19 restrictions were enacted in practice, including their discontents. The study’s findings contribute to further insights into the role of alcohol policy in food culture and opens up for further bridging of food studies, service studies, and alcohol research.

KEYWORDS:

• Alcohol policy
• covid-19
• food culture
• governance
• hospitality industry
• practical knowledge
• service work
• Sweden

Introduction

This paper studies what it means to be governed by public policy in commercial food and beverage service work. The supply and consumption of alcoholic beverages are important aspects of all food cultures that involve some kind of alcohol (Hunt, Moloney, and Evans 2009; Lyons and Kersey 2020). Bars, restaurants, and other licensed premises are thus important commercial spaces of food culture (e.g., Farrer 2021; Jönsson and Tellström 2018; Ocejo 2017). Our inquiry focuses on Sweden, where public policies (by which we refer broadly to legislation, recommendations, and strategies of governance by public authorities) provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic (some directly targeting licensed premises), combined with general social distancing and a comparably restrictive alcohol policy meant a sudden change in the organization of commercial food and alcohol serving. This shift moreover resulted in significant financial set-backs in the hospitality industry (Statistcs Sweden 2021a; Statistics Sweden 2021b). Thus, the pandemic’s consequences for Swedish hospitality industry follow international trends of sudden peril and calls for short-term solutions (cf., Dube, Nhamo, and Chikodzi 2021; Allison, Ray, and Rohel 2021). While the pandemic and its responses came both suddenly and rapidly, Baum et al. (2020) propose that the troubles experienced by the hospitality industry are not new, but rather an aggravation of long-term issues of precarious work, such as meager pay and insecure contracts. Regardless of framing, extant research shows that the pandemic and the political responses to battle its contagion had significant impact on the everyday food culture on licensed premises and in other service venues.

Sweden’s approach to battle the pandemic has been characterized as “soft,” relying on personal responsibility and public “recommendations” – voluntary yet strongly worded propositions for public behavior (Giritli Nygren and Olofsson 2020). Even though Swedish alcohol policy is generally considered one of the most restrictive among countries in the Global North, the Swedish Government never closed down licensed premises entirely, in contrast to, for example, the full-scale lockdowns of the UK and South Carolina (see, Brizek et al. 2021; Gordon-Wilson 2021). Instead, the Swedish Government implemented a series of increasingly restrictive policies for such premises: restrictions on opening hours, alcohol serving hours, the size and distancing of groups of patrons, etc. By studying managers of licensed premises in a mid-sized Swedish city, this paper examines what it meant for them to be governed by “Covid-19 policies” during their strictest iteration. This meant organizing service work while also directly affecting financial and bureaucratic aspects of the business. We thus set out to answer the question: what did it mean for managers of licensed venues to turn Swedish Covid-19 policy into practice?

The paper is organized as follows: first, we review extant research on alcohol policy in food culture. Second, we present our theoretical approach, focusing on the dynamics of public policy and practical knowledge in alcohol service. Third, we outline Swedish alcohol and Covid-19 policies decreed to govern licensed premises. Fourth, we describe the fieldwork and analysis. Fifth, we show what it meant for Swedish managers of licensed premises to be governed by Covid-19 policy frontstage, backstage, and across stage boundaries. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications for the study of alcohol, service work, and food culture.

Bridging alcohol research and food studies: governance in service work practice

Studies of alcohol and drinking cultures tend to treat alcohol foremost as a drug with negative public health consequences. This leads to generally understating or obscuring the pleasures, cultural significance and gastronomic uses of such intoxicating beverages (see, Hunt, Moloney, and Evans 2009; Lyons and Kersey 2020). Thus, while the rationale of alcohol policies tends to be improved public health and social welfare among consumers (Babor et al. 2010), they simultaneously govern food culture (Hasselgren 2010; Jönsson and Tellström 2018). However, the tendency of studying alcohol policies at macro and policy-making levels has left their practical, everyday enactment on licensed premises understudied (Buvik and Tutenges 2018).

Extant research grants the licensed serving of alcohol relatively little attention. Alcohol research generally focuses on consumption and consumers (cf., Hunt, Moloney, and Evans 2009; Lyons and Kersey 2020), as does food studies (Bååth 2018; Neuman 2019). Moreover, despite the virtual eruption of food studies in recent decades, studies of alcohol service as food culture are comparatively scant (e.g., Farrer 2021; Ocejo 2017; Scander, Neuman, and Tellström 2019). Hospitality research is moreover dominated by studies seeking to optimize customer satisfaction (Rodríguez-López et al. 2020), generally, omitting how food and alcohol service realizes or mirrors social forces. Yet, as Ocejo (2017) shows, workers who pour, mix, and serve alcoholic beverages on licensed premises are integral to present-day food culture and entangled with more general institutional processes.

Inspired by symbolic interactionism (e.g., Goffman 1959), studies of service work practices in restaurants, pubs, etc., have traditionally focused on the “frontstage” interaction of servers and patrons and the “backstage” interaction of servers and managers. At the frontstage, servers might utilize different interaction strategies to manage patrons and their impressions of the service, such as the deployment of formal and informal interaction (Mars and Nicod 1984; see, also, Wilson 2019; Scander, Neuman, and Tellström 2019). In the backstage, the staff carry out preparations, manage finances, and cope with emotional and social distress out of the patrons’ sight, thus maintaining the frontstage scenery (e.g., Esholdt 2019; Fine 2009; Foff Paul 1991).

The precariousness of service work on licensed premises, however, challenges the boundary of frontstage and backstage. In order to cope with both patrons and managers, and as varied issues as meager pay, sexual harassment, and exhaustion, servers utilize different collectivizing practices, such as humor (Esholdt 2019), pooling tips (Mulinari 2019; cf., Wilson 2019), and solidarizing with coworkers in general (Korczynski 2003; Foff Paul 1991). Solidarizing may moreover extend beyond co-workers to include managers and patrons (Marshall 1986; Wellton, Jonsson, and Svingstedt 2018). While these studies give important insights into the culture and practice of service work and management on licensed premises, they omit the role of public policy.

A few studies have, however, focused specifically on alcohol policies in alcohol service, especially the assessment of patrons’ intoxication. One interesting argument is that liquor licenses and policies make bartenders act as “street-level bureaucrats,” actively enforcing public policy among the patrons-as-citizens (Buvik and Tutenges 2018). Yet, some bartenders are either unable or unwilling to actively police their patrons (Buvik 2013), and the built environment of licensed premises might even promote intoxication (Tutenges and Bøhling 2019). These studies suggest an important dimension of restaurant service work on licensed premises: alcohol policies charge serving staff with supervising patrons’ intoxication and other dimensions of legal drinking.

Studies in the history of alcohol service moreover show how specific forms of drinking, such as the speak-easy and the bar tour, have survived as national food practices long after the disappearance of the policies, which they once sought to evade (Hasselgren 2010; Jönsson and Tellström 2018; Ocejo 2017). Thus, alcohol policies have historically affected the cultural and practical dimensions commercial food and beverage service, just as public policies, and their resistance, have shaped street-food vending (Allison, Ray, and Rohel 2021). Yet, the study of “street-level” alcohol policy focuses primarily on alcohol as an intoxicant and the risks of abusive consumption, therefore offering only a partial understanding of its food-cultural role (cf., Buvik 2013; Buvik and Baklien 2014; Buvik and Tutenges 2018). Food and service studies, in contrast, supply little insights into alcohol policies’ role in food culture, with the notable exception of a few historical studies (Hasselgren 2010; Jönsson and Tellström 2018; Ocejo 2017). The extant research thus circles a blind spot: how alcohol policies govern contemporary food culture in practice.

Being governed in theory: policy and the reality of alcohol service

To analyze the practical implementation of Swedish Covid-19 policy, we rely on Scott’s (1998, 2009, 1985) theories of state governance and resistance. In Seeing Like a State (1998), he identifies that states and their subjects act in conjunction with two different – yet interdependent – types of knowledge. Techne refers to the formalized, generalized and abstract knowledge deployed by governments and their agencies through policy (Scott 1998, 319–23). Techne seeks to produce“legible” subjects, referring to the construction of subjects according to (supposedly) objective measures, categories, etc. The legibility achieved by the imposition of techne through public policy thus allows the state to “see,” and govern (or “manipulate”), its subjects (Scott 1998, 2–3, 183). Metis is, in contrast, the practical and locally situated knowledge of the governed subjects – regular people (Scott 1998, 311–16). Therefore, inquiring into what it means to be governed concerns the dynamics of how governmental policy interacts with subjects’ (situated) practical knowledge, wherein the subjects’ actual legibility is realized. In our case, this calls for attention to how the techne of Swedish alcohol and Covid-19 policies interacts with the metis of practically experienced service work on licensed premises.

As policies dissonate with practical knowledge, conflicts might result in either the states’ dominance of the subjects’ local environment or the local people’s ability to evade “subject status [… i.e., the state’s] capacity to extract direct taxes and labor from a subject population” (Scott 2009, 330, italics added). The art of not being governed thus means avoiding legibility, and subjecting to the state’s coercive ability to demand involuntary (usually unpaid) work and obtain property from subjects according to the state’s policies (i.e., demands) (cf., Hull 2012). Resistance, it follows, implies that people refuse or avoid complying with policies, while the state struggles – or fails – to implement one or more of a policy’s decrees and thus extract less labor or taxes than intended. Such resistance might come either through disobedience or, less explicitly, through reluctant compliance (Scott 1985). While not primarily discussing policy, extant studies of service work in licensed venues have utilized Scott’s approach to analyze managerial compliance among servers in terms of combining coping with resistance, such as in pooling tips and utilizing patron interaction to avoid direct interaction with managers (see, Foff Paul 1991; Mulinari 2019; cf., Wilson 2019). The outcome affects the legibility of the service workers and, effectively, the managers’ success or failure of governance

Turning to the governance of public policy, it is worth noting that states regularly succeed in policy implementation, thus constructing legible, governed subjects. Such subjects might be characterized as “organizational centaurs” (Ahrne 1994, 28–49): hybrid actors – part organization, part individual – who substitute some of their personal beliefs, goals, and situated judgment with the organizational equivalent in an at least nominally harmonious manner. Such hybridity is not necessarily a compromise between personal and formalized knowledge. To the contrary, professionalism in service work presumes such hybridity in order to cope with the significant degree of unpredictability of service work, for example, in the interaction with patrons (Noordegraaf 2007). Likewise, policies generally assume that the governed subjects will use their own judgment to some extent, albeit without jeopardizing their legibility or the state’s aims and legitimacy (Scott 1998, 310). Buvik and Tutenges’s (2018) argument that bartenders become “street-level bureaucrats” exemplify how these workers create hybrids of their practical knowledge and public alcohol policy. These tensions and the hybridity of handling them call for a research approach that allows for examining the realization of policy in practice.

Swedish alcohol policy and the Covid-19 pandemic

Sweden has a long history of regulating production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. While generally perceived as restrictive compared to other Western countries, Swedish alcohol policy has been successively liberalized in the last 70 years, especially after the country joined the EU (Johansson 2008; Hasselgren 2010; Jönsson and Tellström 2018). The Swedish Government achieves the legibility of licensed premises by requiring the owners to procure liquor licenses from the municipal authorities to legally serve alcohol. The premise’s owner must fulfil a number of criteria to obtain such a license, such as having no criminal record, passing a test on Swedish alcohol policy, and paying a permit fee. To be eligible for a liquor license, the premises must moreover have a kitchen and serve meals, technically allowing only restaurants (All Swedish bars are therefore, legally speaking, restaurants). There is, in addition, a more restrictive liquor license, which allows, for example, producers and importers of alcoholic beverages to serve small amounts of their wares at organized events (Swedish Government 2010). If the municipal auditors discover violations of license rules on the premises, the license holder may be warned and fined, and in cases of excessive or repeated breaches, lose the license and face legal prosecution.

In March 2020, the Swedish Government began to implement policies to stifle the contagion of Covid-19 in licensed venues. The legal status of different Swedish Covid-19 policies is a complex matter, due to different municipalities’ interpretations of national policies, the law and the Public Health Agency of Sweden’s recommendations for observing them. Some of them were state legislation, such as legal hours for alcohol service, while other rules were municipal interpretations of the Public Health Agency’s recommendations for ensuring legal abidance among license holders. For the license holder, however, the difference between a municipal rule and a state law was negligeable as they were both audited in the same processes and violations prosecuted in the same manner. The laws, recommendations and their interpretations also varied over time, and (somewhat) between municipalities. Therefore, this paper focuses on their practical enactment from March 1 to June 1, 2021 in a southern Swedish municipality. The time period coincides with the strictest version of the policy (Table 1).

Table 1. Swedish Covid-19 policies for licensed venues. (Based on Olofsson and Vilhelmsson 2022; Sweden Public Health Agency 2020b, 2020a, 2021; Swedish Government 2020).

Date	Policy decrees
2020–03–24	Only table serving; only seated patrons; information signs; (undefined) safety distance of gatherings of patrons.
2020–06–17	Enacting of the law 2020:527 for temporary infection control measures in service venues; specification of safe distance to minimum 1 meter and the municipal control agencies’ responsibility for auditing observance of the law.
2020–06–29	Public Health Administration’s advice for observing the law 2020:527, including suggestions for posting information signs and re-arranging the venue to promote patron observance of safety distance etc.
2020–11–20	No serving of alcohol after 22:00; groups of patrons may not exceed 8 people.
2020–12–24	No serving of alcohol after 20:00; groups of patrons may not exceed 4 people.
2021–03–01	Venue to be vacated after 20:30.
2021–06–01^a	No serving of alcohol after 22:00; premises vacated 22:30.
2021–07–01^a	No limits on patron companies; no time-limits on operation hours or alcohol serving.
2021–09-29^a	All relevant restrictions reversed.

^aEnacted after the fieldwork.

These policies meant new and more far-reaching regulations, audits, and potential sanctions for licensed venues, contrasting Sweden’s general reliance on personal responsibility to battle the pandemic (Giritli Nygren and Olofsson 2020). The Government sought to make license holders further legible to advance interventions in everyday social spheres (cf., Scott 1998, 183). This need justified the implementation of new rules to ensure that staff and patrons of licensed premises complied with the Government’s disease control strategy. Municipal agencies were assigned to audit policy observance among licensed premises, both on these agencies’ own initiative and in response to complaints from concerned members of the public.

The municipality studied in this paper is located in southern Sweden, on the coastline bordering to Denmark. The majority of its approximately 150,000 inhabitants live in the in the urban area, harboring a comparably large number of licensed premises for a city its size. The municipal Health and Environment Agency (which normally audits food and water safety) organized audits of compliance with Covid-19 policy, occasionally in cooperation with the Licensing Board (operated by the municipal Agency of Social Welfare) and the Police. Possible sanctions of license holders include reprimands, fines, and in extreme cases forced closure or withdrawal of the liquor license. To aid license holders’ policy implementation, they were referred to the Public Health Agency’s recommendations and local auditors. Further, the Government offered financial aid programs, foremost compensating businesses for salary costs for furloughing workers, and income losses for landlords reducing rents. Moreover, businesses were able to postpone taxes and take out publicly funded loans. This support package was administered by the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth and the Swedish Tax Agency (see, “Economic policy” in Olofsson and Vilhelmsson 2022). Additionally, it is worth noting that the public retail monopoly Systembolaget controls all off-license alcohol sales (>3.5% ABV). Thus, Swedish licensed premises could not (legally) substitute on-license sales with off-license sales (see, also, Skoglund and Selander 2021).

Reviewing the Swedish Government’s policies for battling the pandemic in licensed venues offers an insight into the formalized, abstract, and generalized knowledge of the state, including what kind of labor it demands their (license holding) subjects to carry out to avoid sanctions. Yet, the content of policies alone does not say anything about their implementation. To understand how policy becomes social reality demands investigating how its tenets conflict and/or form hybrids with the practical knowledge of license holders.

Fieldwork and analysis

The study focuses on managers of independently operated licensed premises (i.e., not part of a chain, large conglomerate, or hotel) who also worked directly in the service operation, thus assuming a particularly relevant role for implementing Covid-19 policies in practice. Beyond direct experience of being governed by these policies in alcohol service work, the managers were formally responsible for their employees’ and, in extension, their patrons’ policy compliance while on the premises. All but one of the interviewed managers also owned at least a share of the licensed premises they managed, implying more substantial financial stakes compared to an employee (an employee might become unemployed while an owner might face both unemployment and substantial costs or debt in the case of bankruptcy).

The field researcher (Jonas Bååth) interviewed the managers in April to May 2021, at the point when the policy was the most far-reaching (cf. Table 1). The managers’ premises were all situated in the studied municipality’s mid-sized city center and the surrounding countryside. Focusing on a specific municipality was necessary because the Swedish Government charged the individual municipalities with interpreting and auditing compliance with relevant Covid-19 policies.

The interviewees include 11 managers and one municipal auditor. Of the managers, seven operated one or more licensed premises, three operated wineries with occasional tasting events, and one operated a brewery, which had terminated its tasting events due to the pandemic. All businesses were independent and did not include fine dining establishments (despite several attempts to include managers of such venues) or nightclubs (because none were operational due to restrictions of operational hours). The field researcher adopted a maximum variation sample strategy in pursuit of a broad range of perspectives. The interviewed managers therefore include a heterogeneous group of people; men and women of varied ages (early 20ʹs to late 60ʹs), time spent in managerial positions (less than a year to several decades), and both majority Swedish and migrant backgrounds.

The field researcher recruited the interviewees through e-mail and Facebook. Interviewees received information about the study’s purpose, methods, that their participation would be anonymized, etc., as is both conventional and recommended in interview research (Gubrium et al. 2012). The field researcher moreover offered the interviewees a copy of the recorded audio file of their interview. Due to staff shortages and a significantly larger workload for many managers on licensed premises during the relevant period, a significant number of planned interviews did not materialize.

Interviews were conducted either digitally via a video call or at the premises of the business, according to the interviewee’s preference. Before starting the interview, the interviewee was asked to verify that they consented to being recorded and the interviewer repeated the conditions for the interview. In the cases of on-site interviews, these included observations of the premises interiors, while observing current policies for minimizing Covid-19 infection. The interviews were pursued as inter-subjective creations of narratives outlining the interviewees’ experiences (Gubrium and Holstein 2012). Interviews spanned 60–120 minutes each and focused on the businesses in general and the managers’ experiences of Covid-19 policy implementation.

After transcription, both authors coded the interviews focusing on how the interviewees described the Covid-19 policies, how they attempted to adjust their work practices and the licensed premise’s environment to it, as well as their potential issues with the implementation and effects of these policies. In the interest of analytical reflexivity both authors reviewed each other’s coded documents, ensuring mutual use of codes. At a later stage, the field researcher interviewed an additional auditor and a hospitality industry representative to contextualize and check the study’s findings with well-informed interlocutors. The rationale of these later-stage interviews was to test whether the analysis’ findings related to experiences of Covid-19 policy implementation both in the Swedish hospitality industry in general and among public authorities, or if some dimensions had been left out or exaggerated (e.g., due to the focus on a specific municipality). The interviewees generally agreed with the findings. The industry representative, however, added that licensed venues in rural municipalities might have experiences that vary to some degree, due to the increase in domestic tourism during the pandemic.

Being governed in alcohol service

By examining how the managers of licensed premises dealt with Swedish Covid-19 policy, we investigate how they practiced the “art of being governed.” This art implies their ability to achieve the hybridity of governed subjects, and its discontents (cf., Scott 2009). The ability to see what goes on at licensed premises was essential for the legibility of the managers and their staff, while the visibility varied between different positions on the premises, as shown by symbolic-interactionist research. Thus, we start by analyzing frontstage governance, then continue backstage, and lastly how governance traverses and challenges the stage boundary.

Supervising patrons and involuntary formality: being governed frontstage

Frontstage governance refers to how servers translate policy into action in the direct vicinity of patrons (cf., Goffman 1959; Mars and Nicod 1984). To be governed at the front stage means to inform and supervise patrons, while simultaneously being prepared to deal with the sudden events of public audits. A fundamental aspect of this governance is how it informs and affects the interaction with patrons. Some managers argued that doing this was the staff’s forte. Due to the nature of their work, they considered them experts on “analyzing people … [we] have no problems with discharging patrons … we know how to do it nicely.” (Interviewee 6) To achieve such governance meant devising new routines for supervising patrons, such as “all patrons have to be outside 20:30. So, at 20:20, then we, you know, distribute the checks to all tables and ensure that they are all closed [i.e., paid]” (interviewee 1). This routine is more formal and impersonal than the conventional interaction of staff and patrons at closing, where checks are rarely distributed prior to patrons’ request. Other forms of supervision involved changes in the physical environment, such as measured distances between tables, putting up physical barriers between or barring off tables, which could not be moved, and to remove stools from the bar to discourage patrons from using it, all in line with the Public Health Agency’s recommendations (2020b).

The managers agreed that the vast majority of patrons followed, or at least attempted to follow, the restrictions after some uncertain initial months in 2020. Yet, some patrons contested the restrictions, referring to them as irrelevant or that staff were not authorized to police them. In these situations, the serving staff had to formalize their modes of interaction with patrons by stating, for example, “it does not matter how much you pay [or who you are], I won’t serve you [past the hour of operation]” (Interviewee 7) or “these are the rules … it’s a job we’ve been assigned [by the government]” (Interviewee 8), implying that the policy’s decree was beyond the server’s or manager’s power. Yet, some managers experienced that such formalizations were in vain. One manager notes: “I stood there, like, all Lilliputian and tried to inform the patrons … But they didn’t listen. And they didn’t really want to listen” (Interviewee 5), referring to how her short stature hindered her from commanding authority. Generally, however, the managers describe the supervision of patrons as the staff taking on “guard work,” or assuming a “guard function,” which might jeopardize the patrons’ satisfaction.

In public audits of licensed premises’ observance of Covid-19 policies, auditors showed up during service hours to assess whether the venue had supplied sufficient information and spacing, and whether the patrons kept said distances, group sizes, etc. Audits were generally described as unproblematic for both parties, either the auditors found no problems or fixing those problems were easy and straightforward. Patrons or passersby were, however, also potential inspectors. According to the auditor interviewed, complaints from concerned citizens had provoked 60% of public audits. A less positive version of the policy and service practice hybrid was therefore fueled by some managers’ fear of being audited due to such complaints.

We’re panicking over [the risk of] being busted in an audit … Our [liquor] license is what enables us to have jobs … So, if it stands between a couple of dissatisfied patrons or getting caught, then that [the latter] is no alternative. (Interviewee 8)

There were also instances of discord between managers and auditors. Several managers found that the auditors were over-zealous, lacked a holistic view of the operation and expressed unreasonable expectations on the serving staff’s ability to supervise patrons. The auditor affirmed such issues to some extent: “ … we bring a measuring rod. Often, it serves a pedagogical purpose, because one meter is much longer than you might think” (Interviewee 2). Before the pandemic law defined safe distance to one meter, it “was defined as ‘one arm’s length’ [… which] could provoke a lot of debate [with managers] regarding whose arm we should use [as reference] and so on” (Interviewee 2). This case is illustrative of how states make their subjects legible (Scott 1998). Defining safe distance to one meter meant that auditors could review all premises according to a general, abstract measure. This practice reduced the ambiguity of safe distance, but the pedagogical value of the measuring rod also served to subjugate situated judgment and practical knowledge of safe distance or other means of observing the spirit of the pandemic law.

The art of being governed at the front stage thus largely meant the art of devising new, further formalized modes of interaction with patrons and to cope with auditors’ rulings whenever they conflicted with the serving staff’s practice. By using the policy as a (loose) script, the managers and their staff enabled to distance themselves from the patrons, especially problematic ones, through the formalities of general, abstract, and impersonal rules that everyone has to follow. Such formality might, to some extent, imbue the serving staff with the Government’s authority. This, however, placed the manager (and staff) in a conflicting position during audits, because the nature of the audit did not allow for them to solidarize with their auditors, nor with the patrons.

Managing uncertainty and coping with fallout: being governed backstage

While much of the rules decreed by Covid-19 policy were realized in the licensed premises’ frontstage, the backstage of these premises were far from unaffected by their implementation. The backstage is a space where managers (and serving staff) expressed emotions, coped with uncertainties, managed the financial consequences of policy observance, and interpreted policies beyond the direct interaction with patrons and auditors.

The policy’s rules for legal hours of operation clashed with those that conventionally characterize licensed premises. The time-limit set first to 22:00, and then 20:00 meant fewer paying patrons. For example, it limited the premise to one “sitting” instead of the conventional two, effectively halving the number of patrons served per night. Yet, chefs and bartenders had to carry out virtually the same preparations for one sitting as for two. Due to the negative financial consequences of this arrangement, the managers devised backstage practices to cope with them. Examples include the organization of skeleton crews and abstaining from employing bouncers. Breweries and wineries found themselves forced to abstain from lucrative tasting events; “a significant source of income … virtually eradicated” (Interviewee 11). One manager explained that they initially closed down the entire brewpub operation, but that they had recently opened it up because “we have costs for this venue [and thus] we have to generate income somehow” (Interviewee 12).

These coping-strategies must be understood in the light of how the managers generally found the Government’s financial relief to private businesses ill-fitting for the character of licensed venues (and small-scale beverage production): open-ended office turnaround, steep costs for financial and legal advice to obtain comparably moderate reliefs, and no actual compensation for the financial losses or new work routines associated with observing the Covid-19 policy frontstage. These financial issues also meant significant emotional stress for the managers: one described trying to keep the business running as “going through hell” (Interviewee 7). Others tell about sleep issues, the emotional pain and feelings of betrayal seeing employees and friends in the industry lose their jobs.

Backstage governance also included the interpretation of policies to practically realize them, at the licensed premise’s frontstage. The managers received information of current policies either in contact with the municipal license board and environmental authorities and by interpreting public announcements from the Swedish Government and the Public Health Agency in news media. The interviewed managers’ experience of the local authorities tasked with auditing policy observance is varied, largely attributed to the individual auditor’s competence and personality (cf., Buvik and Baklien 2014). Yet, several managers displayed sympathy for the local auditors, acknowledging that they also worked on the receiving end of the Government’s policy, which might not offer auditors the optimal conditions for doing their job well.

Once received, the managers discussed the consequences and strategies of policy compliance with employees and contracted bouncers. Such discussions included the development of new work routines, security measures and the ability, or necessity, to abstain from work. Some managers also discussed such matters in Facebook groups for people working in Swedish bars and restaurants. In these fora, managers and staff shared how they interpreted current policies but also how local authorities’ interpretation differed between municipalities.

The interviewed managers emphasized a general experience of lacking policy precision. For example, they criticized the imprecision in battling contagion by restricting hours of operation, including those of alcohol service. Indeed, this was considered especially frustrating as alcohol service is already substantially regulated. With last call as early as 20:00, several managers argued that guests simply move on to drink at home, often in larger groups, increasing the risk of contagion vis à vis the restaurant or pub.

There are three [patrons] sitting here until half past seven, and then “Where shall we watch the film? Should we play video games? Who bought the booze?” […] The evening continues, but at home. And with more company than there were here [on the premises]. (Interviewee 8)

Beyond the experience that patrons leave to drink and socialize in less restrictive manners than on the licensed premises, several managers found that observing general and abstract rules of the policies means exercising serving in less secure ways. For example, the financial issues due to decreased turnover and ill-fitting relief meant that many managers could not afford contracting bouncers, while the increased demand on supervising patrons meant a greater need thereof.

The sudden shifts and turns of the Covid-19 situation also produced a lot of uncertainty: particularly in the early developments of the pandemic, little was known about the manner in which Covid-19 spread between people, meaning that license holders (and others) were at a loss at what decisions to make to mitigate contagion. Uncertainty over the development of policy responses and restrictions in the face of the spread of the illness was also noted. License holders professed to doubt whether they could keep staff on or make new hires, and expressed general worries about their business future, both financially and their own and the staff’s ability to persist.

Another aspect of the managers’ experience of being subjected to significant restrictions (compared to other industries) was expressed in terms of being singled out. The managers professed that they were treated as the scape goat for the pandemic, unfairly blamed for spreading infection. One interviewee compared restrictions of licensed venues with other organizations free to “keep on as usual.” The example given was of an employee’s wife’s workplace, a secondary school lunch hall: “1,100 students. No four[persons]-per-table. No distancing. No queue restrictions.” (Interviewee 7). The background for this experience is threefold. First, the managers argued that other public spaces, such as schools and shopping malls, were far less regulated. Secondly, that the licensed premises’ reliance on their liquor license make them easy to regulate, as there is already a tight set of regulations of how people are to behave around alcohol consumption, with clear responsibilities on part of license holders to uphold them. A condition which thirdly, they hypothesized, allowed licensed venues to function particularly well for politicians to show force and decisiveness: “ … in this case, there was a constitutional change, with time limited bans on the freedom of enterprise. There is no [scientific] basis for it. No discussion. … Just that people are willing to accept it because of the pandemic. But what happens next?” (Interviewee 1).

The risk of contagion was, however, not only a risk for patrons but also for the service staff. The interviewed managers perceived this risk in varied ways. One manager casually argues that by the time of the interview “essentially everyone” (Interviewee 4) of the staff had been infected with (and recovered from) Covid-19. These worries were in some instances deferred to employees’ discretion, by claiming that it was “up to them” if they wanted to wear particular personal protective equipment such as face masks, plastic visors, etc. While expressed in the spirit of support of staff taking the precautions they found necessary, this also indicates the limits to which managers see their responsibility in relation to employee safety concerns. Other managers framed their account in terms of encouraging servers to take whatever safety precautions they wished and that they had sought to reduce the hours (and thus grant access to public income loss relief) for those employees who feared infection the most.

The uncertainty of the pandemic restrictions, and when they were likely to be resolved, shaped the managers’ outlook and practices. Generally, they expressed longing for the rapport and bonhomie of interacting with patrons and coworkers into the early morning hours. The owners of a vineyard that, due to the limitations on group sizes could only receive smaller groups for tastings, talked about the intimacy of smaller groups as a rare upside in the pandemic (even if it meant a significant financial loss). Generally, though, the absence of patrons seems to result in a less enjoyable work situation.

The art of being governed in the licensed premises’ backstage largely means coping with the fallout of frontstage governance, provoking a mixture of financial, emotional, and relational issues. While governance makes service work increasingly formal, the backstage work further involves coping with frustration over lacking policy precision and the feeling of licensed premises being singled out as malleable subjects and drivers of contagion.

Guard work and solidarity: being governed across the stage boundary

Previous research of restaurant service work indicates that the issues stemming from the precarity of such work transcend or at least challenge the boundary of front- and backstage, afflicting not only the server role but also the person who assumes that role (e.g., Korczynski 2003; Mulinari 2019; Wilson 2019). Similarly, the effects of the Covid-19 policy’s governance further shape and challenge any boundary between the stages.

The frontstage incarnation of being governed may be seen in what several interviewees described in terms of “guard work.” It denotes a new work role characterized by its specific hybridity in which the server becomes further legible in terms of their ability to comply, and ensure patrons’ compliance, with the rules of Covid-19 policies. Guard work is moreover perceived as an unwelcomed role that conflicts with the service role. One manager emphasized that “I’m no bouncer” (Interviewee 4) while others exemplified how it had provoked conflicts between staff and patrons. In the backstage, the social disquiet of the frontstage’s less relaxed and frequent interaction pairs up with financial worries, staffing issues, and general frustration with the current policies. This hybrid arrangement means formalizing more of the serving staff’s interaction with patrons, contrasting the conventional hybridity of liquor service (cf., Buvik and Tutenges 2018), as the staff is charged with enforcing additional rules that have not been normalized among the clientele. Guard work thus shows how governance traverses the boundaries: enforcing frontstage compliance to Covid-19 policies among patrons while increasing backstage fallout. The aim of such policy is to stifle civil unruliness and public health risks, effectively dominating the managers’, and possibly also the staff’s, aim of supplying patrons with enjoyment, pleasure, and ambiance for a profit.

The translation of policy into practice emerges across the stage boundary in many instances. While information about the Covid-19 policy’s decree is usually received and interpreted in the backstage, it is then translated into the frontstage through formal interaction modes and a re-arrangement of the licensed premise’s space. It is illuminating to compare the dynamic of governance front- and backstage on the studied licensed premises with how waitresses in Foff Paul’s study attains autonomy at work. While the managers and the employer attempt to govern waitresses through the implementation of business policies, the waitresses can resist by relying on their practical knowledge and experience of service work. This includes backstage practices such as taking unscheduled breaks (evading “productive work”) and frontstage practices that allow for evading managerial supervision (Foff Paul 1991, 77–104). In contrast, the interviewed managers must rely on a hybrid of practical knowledge and the Covid-19 policy’s abstract and generalized decrees to prevent negative fallout frontstage, while devising new ways of coping with the policy’s effects backstage, such as dealing with negative emotions and applying for (unpredictable) economic relief (cf., Allison, Ray, and Rohel 2021).

The waitresses in Foff Paul’s study and the managers interviewed for this study moreover differ distinctly in their power to improvise. The waitresses’ ability to evade supervision while “on the floor” and to threat to suddenly quit allowed them to improvise and spontaneously resist managerial governance (Foff Paul 1991, 77–96). However, the hybrid character of the interviewed managers’ work does not allow for such improvisation. To improvise always means risking to violate Covid-19 policy, or some authority’s interpretation thereof. Therefore, one manager sought the auditor’s affirmation by sending them e-mails with pictures and descriptions of their policy implementation, which “might have saved us an audit” (Interviewee 8). Yet, others found their more creative solutions were not to the auditors’ liking. One manager posted signs combining the decreed safety information with more parodic appeals, “because I thought it was more fun with a humorous approach, but the auditors did not approve. They thought that we did not take it [the policy] seriously” (Interviewee 1).

The auditors’ disapproval of the signs de facto ruled against a method for the staff to cope by solidarizing with their patrons against the Covid-19 policy or pandemic in general through humor (cf., Frees Esholdt 2019). Moreover, it implies a regime where staff should act in a more formal manner under the restrictions than they would otherwise. While the aforementioned method of solidarizing through humor was outlawed, the managers and their staff still used other practices to cope with the situation. Two such examples are managers who abstained from salary to pay their employees or constructed the situation as a collective crisis that management and staff had to battle together, implying that solidarizing is not only a strategy for coping, but for management as well.

The findings outlined here can partly be attributed to the interviewees being managers and not regular staff (and thus potentially ignorant about the staff’s solidarizing to cope with the manager), but that neither rules out solidarizing between managers and staff, nor between managers and patrons (see, also, Marshall 1986; Wellton, Jonsson, and Svingstedt 2018). Yet, an important difference from the regular operation of licensed premises is that the sudden arrival of Covid-19 policy, its practical effects, and the experience of sudden changes and audits offered a common adversary that all these groups sought to cope with.

Several of the bar and restaurant managers referred to being “restaurant people” in terms of a subculture or networked community. This identification appears to be associated with notions of “having at least some [neuropsychiatric] diagnosis” (Interviewee 6), implying a lack of rational justifications for most people to stay in, or recurringly come back to, working late hours for low wages in the difficult work environment that licensed premises offer. The rewarding social character of the job is an assumed motivation to stay, and the expression of shared identity is one that puts owners and managers on equal footing with staff (contrasting the unequal relation of employer and employee). Practices of solidarizing among “restaurant people” thus simultaneously feature means of coping with and resisting governance (and unruly patrons), implying the kind of unorganized “supportive subculture” underpinning “everyday forms of resistance” (Scott 1985, 35–36; see, also, Foff Paul 1991; Mulinari 2019). The solidarity is also noted by managers recounting the pain of having to reduce employees’ work hours or terminate employment contracts. Upon canceling their long-time bouncer’s hours, one manager remembered apologizing, and in response being assured that “it’s not your fault” and yet “that’s this year’s Christmas gifts gone” (Interviewee 7). It should be noted that the interviewees did not suggest that their status as managers in any way obstructed this solidarity, yet it is beyond this study’s scope to say whether their employees shared that experience. Solidarity can, moreover, be extended to the patrons, with managers fondly noting the understanding and support that they have received from their customers, and the occasional extra tip.

The solidarity across divisions of employees, managers, and patrons does, however, involve a common opponent: the pandemic in general and the government and its agencies more specifically. Examples of complaints involve the feeling that politicians use restrictions to show decisiveness over actually limiting contagion. Tensions in the solidarity show when union agreements call for scheduling restaurant workers four weeks in advance, while the Covid-19 policies could change at two weeks’ notice, frustrating managers especially as it coincided with the aforementioned issues with financial relief.

The art of being governed across the stage boundary thus means removing negative fallout from the frontstage to the backstage as much as possible, this is pursued by devising new modes of frontstage interaction that increasingly distance servers and patrons, both socially and physically, in order to observe the tenets of the Covid-19 policy, including the auditor’s interpretation thereof. While the phrase “social distancing” got popularized during the pandemic, it actually never meant social but physical distance. However, to attain and ensure physical distancing also produced social distance that dissonated with the service staff’s practical knowledge of for-profit informality and hospitality. The Covid-19 policy thus transgressed the stage boundary, jeopardizing the “freedom of emotion” expressed by the waitresses in Foff Paul’s study, for whom, while in a precarious line of work, “the boundary between front and back stage [… emotions] remain distinct” (1991, 150).

Discussion: the art of being governed in food culture

In this paper, we have examined the role of governance in food culture and what it meant to turn Swedish Covid-19 policies into practice in on-license alcohol service. Our inquiry shows how managers and staff employed “the art of being governed.” This art is the ability to navigate the practical, situated knowledge of hospitality service work while integrating it with the general, abstract, and impersonal decrees of Covid-19 policy into a (nominally) functioning hybrid. Further, this art entails a hybridity that differed from the one achieved under Swedish alcohol policy in ordinary circumstances, especially in terms of further formalized interaction with patrons, aggravated fallout in the licensed premises’ backstage, and sudden policy changes (cf., Baum et al. 2020).

Firstly, our findings mirror Jönsson and Tellström’s (2018): the Swedish treatment of licensed premises during the pandemic implies that such establishments are still viewed as spaces of possible resistance and disobedience to public policy, as has been the case at least since the late 19^th century, similar to street-food vendors around the world (Allison, Ray, and Rohel 2021). While Covid-19 policies govern licensed premises, they are regulated foremost with the ambition to make service staff police patrons’ potential noncompliance with current disease control strategy. On the premises, staff and managers implement the policy by carrying out a novel form of “guard work,” suggesting how the state governs by extracting unpaid labor from its subjects (Scott 2009, 330), extending beyond the managerial control into different backstage areas (cf., Foff Paul 1991). The ability of the Swedish Government to achieve such extraction, and thus succeed in their governance of alcohol service, relied on the imminent threat that withdrawal of liquor licenses posed for the individual license holder.

The identification and emphasis of guard work among the interviewees verify how bartenders and other alcohol service workers function as “street-level bureaucrats” (Buvik and Tutenges 2018). Yet, as professional service work means achieving a balanced hybrid of policy and practical knowledge, the further formalized patron-interaction of guard work should not be assumed to be a more professional work role, as it might sacrifice some of the informality of interaction integral to service work professionalism (Noordegraaf 2007).

Our findings show that public policy transgresses the boundary of front- and backstage in manners unaccounted for in extant research on alcohol, hospitality service work, and food culture. Further research focusing on observations of the practices of licensed premises as well as theories explaining the role of policy and regulation in food culture could yield valuable insights (cf., Neuman 2019). Moreover, a broader spectrum of interlocutors (e.g., staff as well as managers) and locations (e.g., fine dining and night clubs) could provide contrasting accounts and found more sophisticated analyses. Finally, long-term observations of everyday work on licensed premises might provide a complementary picture of the everyday reality of alcohol policy implementation.

While we agree with extant studies’ findings of coworker solidarity as means of coping with and resisting managers and patrons (e.g., Korczynski 2003; Mulinari 2019), we find that such solidarizing is also a managerial strategy used to ensure that both employees and managers cope with being governed. Whether the situation during the pandemic represents an amplification of the norm or something qualitatively different about solidarization depends on our attention to the different aspects of solidarization in this space (cf., Baum et al. 2020). While precarious scheduling and working conditions may appear simply aggravating for staff, the volatile and rapid developing character of Covid-19 policies spells new issues to managers. However, while underlying inequalities and tensions between staff and managers may remain in place, our findings show that the problems facing licensed alcohol sales also open up for solidarity that may unite staff, managers, and patrons to cope with and resist external governance and uncertain times (Marshall 1986, 44; Wellton, Jonsson, and Svingstedt 2018; see, also, Ocejo 2017).

The findings all point to some general insights regarding Swedish food culture, and the role of alcohol policy therein. The interviewees identified strongly with being part of a rather egalitarian community of “restaurant people” that enable solidarizing beyond one’s station (see, also, Wellton, Jonsson, and Svingstedt 2018). This finding might imply a coping strategy fostered to counter the historical stigma against licensed premises and their workers in Sweden (Jönsson and Tellström 2018), or, for example, the fact that such premises’ serving staff foremost work during most people’s leisure time. Thus, further studies should investigate the nature of that community and how it relates to the formal hierarchies of food work, employment, commerce, and public policy. It may be fruitful to compare these findings to studies of licensed alcohol service in other countries that harbor distinctly different alcohol consumption cultures and histories in, for example, Denmark and the UK. The current absence of such studies suggests that this is a research gap worth filling to better understand the role of national culture in the governance of food and eating – especially regarding alcohol.

The findings are not normative judgments of Swedish Covid-19 policy or disease control strategy. Irrespective of one’s personal view of different governments’ attempts to battle the pandemic:

… it may well be that codified, hierarchical routines are adequate and possibly the most efficient in the short run. Even in such cases, however, we should be aware of the human costs of stultifying routines and the likely resistance to rote performance. (Scott 1998, 356)

Covid-19 policies were temporary measures to battle an extreme situation. Sweden is moreover a wealthy welfare state, and thus the interviewees’ struggles certainly differed from the desperate situation of food workers in the Global South (see, Allison, Ray, and Rohel 2021). Yet, public policies were, and are still, important dimensions of both groups’ fates and the food cultures their everyday work realizes. The fate of Swedish managers of licensed premises during the pandemic meant similar financial struggles as in other places (cf., Dube, Nhamo, and Chikodzi 2021), and added further bureaucratic dimensions to ensure the legibility of premises, staff and patrons, offering important insights for the role of alcohol policies in service work and food culture.

A last topic worth raising is that the Swedish Government never closed down licensed premises, in contrast to, for example, the UK and South Carolina (Gordon-Wilson 2021; Brizek et al. 2021), but instead sought to further control these spaces and the people therein. To achieve this end, the Government extended its policies for regulating licensed alcohol service to manage an already heavily regulated industry; experienced in the art of being governed. The extent to which these findings resemble the situation in other markets for alcohol service (with or without licensing) represents a useful point of departure for comparative research. Studies of how serving staff and managers deal with alcohol policies will certainly allow for further understandings of the role of alcohol in food culture and society in general.

Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank the interviewees who made the study possible. Moreover, they want to thank Johan Nordgren, Tobias Olofsson, Tomas Cole, Nicklas Neuman, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on previous versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Helsingborg Association of Commerce’s 2021 grant for young scholars at Lund University, Campus Helsingborg.

Notes on contributors

Jonas Bååth

Jonas Bååth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies and a research affiliate at the Centre for Innovation Research, both at Lund University. He holds a doctorate in sociology from Uppsala University. His research resides within socio-economic approaches to markets for food, beverages and intoxicants, and has appeared in outlets, such as Current Sociology and Socio-Economic Review.

Johan Nilsson

Johan Nilsson is an interdisciplinary researcher affiliated with the Center for Market Studies at Stockholm School of Economics. He holds a doctorate in Technology and Social Change from Linköping University. His research revolves around Constructivist Market Studies as well as anthropological approaches to markets, and marketing.