Making sense through false syntheses: Working with paradoxes in the reorganization of the Swedish police

This article analyses how a working group in the Swedish police made sense of their task in the wake of reorganization. It aims to describe how inputs from top management prompted processes of sensemaking within the group, and their subsequent results in responding to latent paradoxes. The police group’s work was studied through participant observation, interviews and documents. The findings illustrate how the group made latent paradoxes salient and how they worked with these paradoxes to ultimately make them latent again by what we call “false syntheses”. Through this process, the group achieved its task, but the paradoxes were reproduced, made latent and pushed away to another part of the organization. Thus, sensemaking transforms paradoxes from latent to salient, from macro to micro levels of the organization.