Title: Being forced to work from home – A focus on how having to work from home following the covid-19 pandemic has affected the employee’s performance and social work life Authors: Ivan Cavar and Malin Jansert Supervisor: Aliaksei Kazlou Background: Because of the recent Covid-19 pandemic many employers had to make the decision to recommend or even force employees to work from home. For some it was an easy transition, for others a real challenge not only by the means of whether one can actually perform their work at home, but also concerning what happens to us when we remove all the necessary social interactions we experience everyday with colleagues and other people connected to the workplace. Aim: The purpose of our research is to understand how the forced shift in working remotely has affected the employees’ attitude towards the professional and social aspects of the workplace. It aims to determine crucial personal and external factors influencing the attitude of said employees, and why (and if) their opinion about their workplace has changed.This paper aims to contribute to the field of external shock in organizations and sudden organizational change. Having waited with the theoretical framework until we had good overview of what the results looked like, we have found the research by Lee and Mitchell (1994) about employee turnover to be relevant to our findings. Although most research about employee turnover concerns itself with turnover per se, we still find the theories discussed relevant as the prerequisite to turnover is attitude changes among employees which is exactly what we want to look at and contribute to. The main contribution of this paper will be to look at how the changes in working routines have affected the specific employee, and how this in turn has affected the employee’s opinion about their workplace. We hope to give a glimpse of how these specific workplaces have been affected and find reasons as to why this might have happened to better understand what factors influence the opinion about the workplace.Completion: To gather information about the perceived changes by employees, a qualitative study has been conducted through 13 interviews among two companies with jobs being based in government administration and academia. The different types of work give us good insight in how the same process has affected professions differently.Conclusion: The professors were affected by the change to a larger extent than the administration employees. Different employees were affected in different ways, but what affected everybody was a loss of social interactions as well as a new outlook on how to perform work.

The 1973 oil shock was the first energy crisis modern industrialized economies experienced. The disruption exposed the limitations of energy systems that rely on fossil fuels, creating a demand for experimentation of energy alternatives. In their book, Renewables: The Politics of a Global Energy Transition, Michaël Aklin, and Johannes Urpelainen provide a framework to analyze this transitionary period for selected countries, as well as the events that provoke the need for change in the form of the 1970s external shocks in oil prices. In this paper, for the first time, Aklin & Urpelainen's framework will be applied to Australia to help explain the "Australian Paradox." The Australian Paradox refers to the misalignment of Australia's climate change policy and exposure to climate change disruption. Though Australia is particularly vulnerable to climate change in several ways, the country is noted among rich industrialized nations for having done very little to promote alternative energies and reduce its carbon footprint. While the oil crises of the 1970s have catalyzed a search for alternative energy sources in some countries, it created a business opportunity for Australia in the form of expanding coal and gas exports, thereby further committing the country to carbon-cased energies. I conclude by reflecting on whether other forms of energy shocks could lead Australia into taking a more aggressive approach to climate change in the near future.