ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how police officers transform themselves while critically addressing the implications of changes within the latest police reform in Sweden. By encouraging the police to develop local police practices closer to the citizens, the reform sets out to tackle the flipsides of previous new public management reforms, accused of making police work less sensitive to local needs. Drawing on a study comprising 40 semi-structured interviews, the analysis shows how the Swedish police reform provides technologies of domination that shape the police officers as subjects capable of navigating local policing dependent on collaboration across organizational boundaries. Instead of simply identifying domination, findings nevertheless reveal how the police officers also address a tense interplay between organizational measures moulding the minds of the police officers, and the enactments of agentic selves trying to resist the reform and this type of subjection.
