Sweden is known for its well-developed welfare state and a large public sector in which many professional social workers are working (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Nygard, 2013). Social work academia is also an established field with 17 social work programmes. Most of these programmes are in departments of social work or the equivalent at universities and university colleges. More than 630 people are employed as teachers and researchers in the social work faculties in Sweden. If other staff categories and administrators are also included, the numbers are even higher.

Social work as a professional area began to develop in the early 20th century in Sweden as a response to the growing prevalence of social problems correlated with industrialisation. At this time a number of social work organisations sought to develop social reforms in areas like housing, child protection and income support. The most influential organisation was the Central Organization for Social Work (Centralförbundet för socialt arbete), which was also the major actor behind the first school that educated social workers in the 1920s. Social work became a formal professional degree in the 1960s; and in the late 1970s, social work was upgraded to an academic subject and a degree that was integrated into the university system.

Despite the stable roles of social work education and the profession, there is a lack of knowledge as to what role social work academics play in social policy formulation and reforms. It is known that professional social workers are not very active as policy actors in the Swedish welfare state (Thorén and Salonen, 2013). But what about Swedish social work academics? In this chapter, we will shed some light on the involvement of social work academics in the social policy process through a survey of social work faculty members in Sweden.

Swedish social policy

From an international perspective, Sweden has a welfare system with several social protection sub-systems (Nygård, 2013). However, in the last decades there are signs of re-formulation of the welfare state that is characterised by retrenchment, fragmentation and marketisation (Johansson and Hvinden, 2007; Meagher and Szebehely, 2013; Kallio et al, 2016). In addition to marginalisation, there is growing long-term unemployment, segregation, and less coverage by social security schemes. Yet, despite these changes in the welfare state, this development is still not the subject of much debate among most social work academics.