Through a critical analysis of theory, policy and practice, The Public and Private Management of Grief looks at how 'recovery' is the prevailing discourse that measures and frames how people grieve, and considers what happens when people 'fail' to recover. 

Pearce draws on in-depth interviews with bereaved people and a range of bereavement professionals, to contemplate how ‘failures’ to recover are socially perceived and acted upon. Grounded in Foucauldian theory, this book problematises the notion of recovery, and instead argues for the acknowledgment of the experience of ‘non-recovery,’ highlighting how recovery is a socially and historically constructed notion linked to the individualised vision of health and happiness promoted by neo-liberal governmentality. 

“Pearce problematises psychological theories of recovery to break new ground in arguing for ‘non-recovery’ as a valid position for bereaved people to inhabit. Drawing on the sociology of emotions, she applies the concept of ‘affective practices’ to theorise grief as embodied, relational, shifting and ambivalent. From this perspective non-recovery no longer represents an unproductive place of stuckness but one of dynamic movement.” (Christine Valentine, Research Fellow and member of the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, UK)