This thesis forms a study of the work of an investigative intelligence group within the Stockholm police during the 1990s. The aim is to research how a group of detectives worked out their assignments and created a meaningful work situation given the conditions and scope of the police organisation. On an overall level the study examines the social construction of the group, and the way its members saw themselves and each other.

The study is mainly based on fieldwork carried out in the group. Reflexive consciousness was a phenomenon characteristic of those studied and of their environment: the ethnologist researched the investigators who were investigating the suspected criminals, who in their turn wheeled round and observed these investigative police.

An organisation like the police structures its employees’ thinking on certain fundamental practices. The material design of the police station corresponded with the divisions the police made into the categories police employees, the public, and suspect criminals. But within the framework of the organisation there was freedom to develop other ways of thinking and scope for shaping the work. The professional work of the detectives was paradoxical in several ways. These investigators developed strategies for concealing their work, sometimes they appeared to find themselves in a liminal situation between the public and the suspects and it was their duty to watch over others but they themselves tried at the same time to evade the control of superiors. Egalitarian relations between work colleagues were an ideal, while at the same time female colleagues were relatively subordinate to the males. Gender inequality seemed thereby not to exist and legitimated male dominance. The first three factors can be understood in the context of a certain type of competence developed by the detectives in their work. This was there ability to grasp distinctions and thereby differentiate and maintain boundaries. It was through such processes that meaning was created and some conflicting elements in their work were balanced out.