Taking time seriously

As the new editorial team for Nordic Social Work Research, our primary aim is to strengthen the position of the journal in the field. Among the strategies for doing so, we first aim to reduce the backlog of articles in press waiting for publication and to establish a clear set of processes for effective journal management and promotion. Nordic Social Work Research is a collaborative effort between Nordic and international boards, as well as Nordic and country-level FORSA. We have taken several steps towards more effective journal promotion. Considering the important role Nordic Social Work Research plays, we are currently working with Taylor & Francis to establish an impact factor. We are closely involving editorial members from both the profession and academia, as the journal directly reflects and reflects upon the Nordic profession of social work. With this, the new team is also working to make the review process more efficient. In addition to printing two special issues this year, we have for this year reduced the article backlog by doubling the number of articles in all regular issues published. In the coming year, we will work closely with our national and international editorial boards and FORSA in developing a smoother editing process. We will be the Nordic journal that actively speaks for and critically reflects upon the profession. Second, as noted in the editorial in March 2022 (Thoresen et al. 2022), we aim at increasing the methodological breadth of the literature published. We will also continue to publish studies focused across both global and local, Nordic levels. For instance, earlier issues of Nordic Social Work Research have explored how social work practice is conducted within various institutional settings (Nissen and Eriksson 2016) and organizational contexts (Eriksson and Nissen 2016) and the implications this has for those service users receiving and/or encountering these services, as well as vulnerable social groups more generally. This scholarship aims to better understand service provision and how such provision has transformed to meet the needs of users, given their everyday life contexts. The central focus has been on how changing organizations and systems shape the person in the situation today. Relevant to our editorial goal of ‘taking time seriously’, the social work literature has begun to more broadly analyse how aspects of temporality shape the provision and experience of social work. Dialectically, this literature also explores how changing service experiences in turn shape understandings of time and temporality, both for social worker and service user. This ‘temporal turn’ approach brings together a discussion of the global and the local by focusing across experiential levels and across immigration and welfare systems. Within a recent issue of this journal, Mulinari (2021) describes the ‘temporal border practices’ that take place in the ‘policing of time’ experienced by unemployed women who are positioned between the migration and unemployment systems. Mulinari’s article analyses the gendered and racialized nature of such a policed temporality to show how this creates a second – more ‘flexible, patient and disposable’ workforce. Several articles have applied a focus on temporality by taking up the idea of biographical circumstance (Gubrium and Leirvik 2022), exploring the intersections between change through the life course and changing systems through time, enabling focus on the ‘person in the changing situation’. In a recent article, Hansen and Gubrium (2021) explore how the impact of social work programming – in particular, labour activation programming – might be analysed with focus on encounters between changing welfare systems and between service users who actively construct meaning through reference to changing personal histories over time. In a follow-up article, the same authors (Hansen and Gubrium 2022) take the analysis of temporality a step further, applying an in-depth rhythm analysis NORDIC SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH 2022, VOL. 12, NO. 4, 407–409 https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2022. 2135287