Police officers and pressure for professional performance

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Carlos Manuel Gonçalves1, David Tavares2, Noémia Lopes3, Rúben Elias4

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1Universidade do Porto - Faculdade de Letras, Portugal; 2Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa (ESTeSL-IPL); 3Instituto Universitário Egas Moniz (IUEM); 4Universidade do Porto - Faculdade de Letras, Portugal

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Recent decades have been marked by important changes in work in the European context. These changes incorporate, among other factors, the continued growth of the economic services sector, the legal deregulation of labour relations, new forms of work organisation, the expansion of the use of technologies in the various work contexts and the action of new social agents. The sociological analysis of professional groups, with a new impulse in the 1990s and following years, goes through those changes and the reconfigurations of such groups. Our paper focuses on the portuguese police professional group. The research on this group raises questions that arise from the nature of its activity and its being subordinated to a function of surveillance/repression and maintenance of the State. It is an opaque group, difficult to observe and that keeps secrecy/reservation about what they do. We are interested in first addressing the nature and working conditions of police officers and then relate these aspects to the social pressure for professional performance to which they are subjected. The results we will present emanate from an ongoing project - "Medicines and dietary supplements in performance consumptions. Social practices, contexts and literacy, ConPerLit" -, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal) (PTDC/SOC/30734/2017) - which was structured in a research methodology that incorporated a questionnaire survey and interviews to the professional group of police officers.