ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two squads of officers each working a time shift together and operating in defined territories in a single municipality. For vocational rehabilitation (VR) counselors, it concentrates on a single office in the same municipality whose workers share work space, spend hours together in informal communication, and come together routinely as a group to go over their cases. Both the police and the voc rehab counselors operate in a distinctive part of a municipality in the American Southwest. The chapter discusses the demographics of this municipality with emphasis on the distinctive area that is common to the work groups of both agencies. It also focuses on the places where the work groups operate in the everyday and then bring forward the voices of the workers to reveal their views on the citizens they police, negotiations over the meaning of work, and the relational dynamics of the work groups.
