"Collaboration" is generally portrayed as being beneficial to intelligence and operational police work, even if previous collaborative research shows that conflicts are common between authorities who are supposed to cooperate. The present study focuses on how officers collaborate in their day-today management of border guarding, taking into consideration the different social and cultural backgrounds of the project participants. To these ends, this qualitative study is based on empirical material gathered from interviews, and field observation sessions with officers working at the Baltic Sea border agencies. The findings suggest that, although collaboration is burdened with bureaucratic difficulties, there is a common understanding of purpose among the project participants. These border officers' common declared their objective is to fight criminality and create a safer Europe. However, the participants possessing different organizational and cultural backgrounds have to adapt to adopt a common language (in officers' terms EU-English), common schemes of categorizing (inside-outside distinctions), and develop a sense of trust and identity. Collaboration is claimed by the informants, and is best achieved through getting involved in everyday practices. They worked side by side, and spent free time together rather than following bureaucratic rules and regulations.

Meetings are common in contemporary working life, but they are often overlooked in academic studies and sometimes defined as empty or boring by employees. Yet, the meeting society is being reproduced again and again. There seem to be hidden ways to incorporate meetings into today’s working life without arousing critique about pointless activities and deviations from what should really be done. One strategy was illustrated in a study of a transnational police project. Police culture celebrates visible crime fighting, which is associated with action, physical toughness, and capturing criminals. The police officers involved in the project emphasized the need to avoid “a lot of meetings,” but de facto constructed their project as meetings. Nonetheless, the project was declared a success. We analyze this paradox in terms of boundary work concerning meetings; the police officers turned some meetings into “real police work” by discursively and practically removing them from the category of bureaucracy and its associations with formalities, rigidity, and documentation. The most important example is how an “operational action group meeting” was renamed “power weeks,” eradicating the very word “meeting” from the term. This was closely associated with increased informality and multi-tasking during these gatherings.

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