Organisational exceptions as vehicles for change: collaborative strategies, trust, and counter strategies in local crime prevention partnerships in Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Enhanced collaboration is among the most common strategies in Swedish crime prevention. This includes multi-agency, cross-professional work and also coordinated activities between public authorities and civil society, often in the framework of a partnership approach. The social services bear the main responsibility for setting up and facilitating this collaboration. In this article, two crime prevention programmes in Gothenburg are analysed together. Both targeted gangs and social disturbances, and both used independent coordinators, mainly social workers, as key holders of the intervention strategy. The projects were investigated using an ethnographic mixed-method approach, where 51 interviews with stakeholders in the partnerships provide the main data used for the analysis. The interaction between these free-standing coordinators (labelled organisational exceptions) and the involved stakeholders reveals an intricate interplay of strategies and counterstrategies used either to evoke change and facilitate joint work or to resist intrusive actions on the part of the coordinators. By understanding the different logics of strategic and operative work in relation to the use of systematic or unsystematic data, as well as the need for the coordinator to gain legitimacy, a fundamental paradox in partnership approaches is indicated; in the process of obtaining a legitimate platform for change, the coordinators risked losing the contributions this platform was about to make.