Organisation and Management Group External Seminar Series
Being regimented: Aspiration, discipline and identity work in the British parachute regiment
Abstract:
This paper analyses how the preferred self-conceptions of men in an elite military unit—the
British Parachute Regiment — were disciplined by the organizationally based discursive
resources on which they drew. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First,
we argue that preferred self-conceptions (i.e. desired identities) are mechanisms for disciplining
employees’ identity work, and analyse how paratroopers were subject to, and constituted
by, the discursive practices of the Regiment. Paratroopers’ preferred conceptions of
their selves were disciplined by understandings both of what it meant to be a paratrooper and
of the institutional processes by which they were made. In talking about how the Regiment
‘manufactured’ them, paratroopers provided insight on how the Regiment produced and
reproduced the idealized identities to which they aspired. Second, to complement other
understandings of identities, we suggest that people are often best characterized as ‘aspirants’.
An aspirational identity is a story-type or template in which an individual construes
him- or herself as one who is earnestly desirous of being a particular kind of person and selfconsciously
and consistently in pursuit of this objective. The recognition of subjectively construed
identities as narrativized permits an appreciation of individuals as sophisticatedly
agentic, while recognizing that their ‘choices’ are made within frameworks of disciplinary
power which both enable and restrict their scope for discursive manoeuvre.
The paper has been published in Organization Studies 30(4) in 2009.
Link: http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/4/355
If you would like to attend the seminar or to enquire more informatin, please contact Donna Sutherland Smith.