The everyday reality of private security work in Sweden: negotiations at the front line of public order maintenance

Abstract

ABSTRACT The private security industry has come to play a major role in Sweden and has become subject to a wide range of regulations. While these regulations give a sense of the role played by private security on the ground, it is important to study how private security actors themselves negotiate their way through these regulations, producing a more complex social order than regulations suggest. To study such everyday negotiations, this article draws on a theoretical approach that places regulatory structures and actors in a dialectical relationship, and on ethnographic studies of private security officers’ everyday reality in the market for security. This article shows the officers’ common concerns about their work, their collective interpretations of (legitimate) work practices, and how they negotiate regulatory structures and the behaviour of market actors (companies and customers). Taken together, insights are provided on how a complex structure–agency dynamic shapes the front-line roles of private security officers and creates a negotiated order on the ground, in turn ultimately redrawing the state/market divide in public order maintenance as envisaged in legislation.