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The purpose of this study was to understand how unit managers within communal home care service for older people, convert political policy and guidelines into practical care, and how they within this process govern their personnel. The study was based on a qualitative method with a hermeneutic approach. Former research disclose that the process of converting political policy and guidelines and how unit managers govern personnel are somewhat tenuous. Previous research show structural shifts and reorganisations within public service consequently shaping todays structure of organizations and management. The study draws on eight interviews with unit managers within two municipalities in Sweden. To carry out our interviews we used a semi-structured interview guide followed with an analysis of our main results using Lipskys concept of discretion and Foucaults theory of governmentality. The results indicate that unit managers’ work, converting political policy and guidelines into practical care, are complex. The study shows that unit managers experience difficulties and differ in their ways in the process of adapting political policy and guidelines into practical care. Unit managers therefor find some of the guidelines more difficult to integrate than others. We find it important in this study to highlight the different ways unit managers work in the process of converting political policy and guidelines, and how they in the process govern their personnel.

Our paper aims to reflect about the relationship between political guidelines of a private company targeted and inserted into the context of national security, or rather, into the constitution of the National State. In addition, we observe the performance of the Companhia de Viação São Paulo – Mato Grosso filling gaps and taking advantage of political guidelines that sought the modernization and progress of the country at all costs. The occupation and colonization of so-called "backlands", "west" or Brazilian "hollow" spaces are the axis of these guidelines. Among these "hollow" spaces, the Companhia de Viação São Paulo – Mato Grosso operated on the west end of the state of São Paulo and on the south of the former state of Mato Grosso developing sailing activities and colonization. Therefore, our focus ranges from the formation of the company in 1908 until 1943, when the sailing activity is turned into a federal agency, tracing the history of those places.