Thornborrow, T. & Brown, A.D. 2009.

‘Being regimented’: Aspiration,

discipline and identity work in the British Parachute Regiment.
Organization Studies 30, 4: 355-376

Abstract
This paper analyzes 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 analyze 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 her-self as one who is earnestly desirous of being a particular kind
of person and self-consciously 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.

Key Words: aspiration, disciplinary power, discourse, identity, identity narrative,

military organization, parachute regiment

1
 ‘What manner of men are these who wear the red beret?...They are, in fact,
men apart. Every man an emperor’. Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein,
Tunisia, 1944.

How do preferred versions of the self discipline individuals’ identity work? We

address this question through an analysis of talk about work identities among

members and ex-members of the British Parachute Regiment, an elite military unit.

This study draws on and contributes to the literatures on work-identity formation,

regulation and realization (e.g., Alvesson and Willmott 2002; Grey 1994; Ibarra 1999;

Knights and McCabe 2003; Markus and Nurius 1986). Subjectively conceived

identities are available to individuals in the form of narratives which position an

individual in relation to the discursive resources available to him or her (cf. McAdams

1996), and which are ‘worked on’ - formed, repaired, maintained, strengthened and

revised to provide a continuing sense of ‘coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson

and Alvesson 2003: 1165). Our argument is that for paratroopers this work was

disciplined by discursive practices which encouraged them to regard themselves as

aspirants engaged continuously in pursuit of highly desirable yet elusive identities.

Previous research has investigated the role of ‘possible selves’ (Markus and Nurius

1996) and ‘provisional selves’ (Ibarra 1999) in processes of identity development, but

these studies have not focused on how preferred conceptions of self are effects of

power. Considerable literatures have developed on organizational and occupational

socialization (e.g., Van Maanen and Schein 1979) and organizational identification

(Dutton, Dukerich and Harquail, 1994) which explain how individuals adjust and

commit to institutions and professions. Yet this work is preoccupied with tasks,

culture and how individuals relate to organizations, rather than the kinds of work

identities that organizations make available to them. Of most relevance to our project

2
is the critical management studies literature that focuses on identity as ‘a target and

medium of management’s regulatory efforts’ (Alvesson and Willmott 2002: 623) and

the processes by which subjects secure ‘their own meaning, identity and reality

through identifying with or resisting the discursive practices that power evokes’

(Knights and McCabe 2003: 1593). But these studies have not paid particular

attention to aspirational identities.

The principal research contribution of this paper is to analyze how preferred versions

of the self are a mechanism for disciplining employees’ identity work (cf. Foucault

1979). We begin by examining the literatures on subjectivity, identity and power. This

is followed by an account of our methodological assumptions and methods of data

collection and analysis. We then provide an account of how 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. The contemporary literature is notable for two streams of theorising: over-

socialized conceptions of individuals which treat identity as determined by structure

(Burrell 1988) and under-socialized versions of people which attribute individuals

with unfettered agency (Henriques et al. 1998). We suggest that in working on their

identity narratives people may conceive themselves as ‘aspirants’ earnestly desirous

of certain identities. This permits analysis 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.

3
Aspirational Identities, Subjectivity and Discourse

The verb ‘to aspire’ means to ‘desire earnestly’, with aspirants generally thought of as

aspiring to a condition that they consider to be higher, better, or nobler than the one

they currently occupy. The idea that some social identities are ‘aspired to’

complements other ways of understanding selves as ‘worked on’ (Alvesson and

Willmott 2002), ‘played at’ (Sartre 1969) and ‘conferred’ (Tajfel and Turner 1986).

Preferred future identities have previously been theorized by social psychologists as

‘possible selves’ (Markus and Nurius 1986), ‘potential selves’ (Gergen 1972) and

‘provisional selves’ (Ibarra 1999), that is, ‘…the ideal selves that we would very

much like to become’ (Markus and Nurius 1986: 954). Ibarra (1999), for example, has

shown how management consultants and investment bankers adapt to new

professional roles by observing role models, experimenting with inchoate images

(provisional selves) and evaluating results in the light of feedback on their behaviour.

Such conceptions suggest that individuals actively select, resist, construct and achieve

many possible selves which people use to frame, guide and evaluate behaviours and

outcomes. Embedded in this tradition, Pratt (2000) has shown how Amway cultivated

discontent and desire among its distributors to create a ‘meaning void’ which spurred

them to pursue continuously ever more grandiose fantasised identities as ‘company’

men and women.

Sociologists, too, have also long recognized that ideal versions of the self (selves to

which people aspire) orient current behaviour (Cooley 1902/1964). Research on

socialization (Van Maanen and Schein 1979) has shown how ‘…the military’s

4
definition and expectations become the individual’s definitions and expectations’

(Arkin and Dobrofsky 1978: 157). More recently, a substantial literature has

developed centred on the concept of ‘identification’, i.e. ‘the degree to which a

member defines him-herself by the same attributes that he or she believes define the

organization’ (Dutton, Dukerich and Harquail 1994: 239). These studies have

demonstrated that people tend to identify strongly with organizations that are

perceived to be prestigious or otherwise attractive, distinctive and homogenous, and

in those instances where membership is public and visible, there is interpersonal

attraction with other members with whom there are shared goals, and a common

history (Pratt 2008). These theorizations, however, have generally lacked a critical

appreciation that preferred versions of the self are effects of power, or an

understanding of the discursive processes by which they are created.

There has been some critical/discursive work on individuals who are occupied in

notional ‘projects of the self’ (Grey 1994), and who are ‘wedded to an aspirational

and self-conscious subjectivity’ (Webb 2006: 189). One strand of this research has

examined how in western societies individualistic values such as ‘the success ethic’

and the ‘achievement principle’ lead people to engage in a self-defeating quest for

illusory (idealized) identities (Collinson 2003; cf. Casey 1995, 1999). A recent trend

in this literature has been to theorize individuals as desiring subjects using the work of

Lacan (Contu and Willmott 2006; Roberts 2005). From this perspective, people’s

understandings of their selves are recurrently subverted because they are centred on a

traumatic central gap - what Lacan refers to as ‘the Real’. People yearn for a core

sense of self, but the ‘I’ is illusory, sustained by unstable fantasies. This ‘lack’

maintains constant desire rendering us subject to permanent instability, with the

5
workplace ‘I’ ‘…always engaged in a complex interactional process of becoming-ness

of both self and organization’ (Harding 2007: 1771). Insightful though this work is,

within organization and management studies it is still at a relatively early stage of

development, while other critical research has not focused specifically on the

disciplinary effects of aspirational identities. More generally, as Kuhn (2006: 1340)

has noted, the study of discourse and identity ‘is an area in which conceptual

contributions overshadow empirical investigations’.

Our research is predicated on an understanding that ‘subjectivity’, especially how it is

constituted ‘socially and historically, out of collective experience’ (Mama 1995: 89),

is a key research issue in organization studies. Here analyzed as a dynamic process in

which people assume and change positions in discourses, subjectivity is concerned

with ‘the way in which individuals understand their lives, their relations and their

work’ (Knights and McCabe 2003: 1588). Research on subjectivity has most often

focused on individuals’ self-construed identities, where self-identity is conceived as a

reflexively organized narrative ‘derived from participation in competing discourses

and various experiences, that is productive of a degree of existential continuity and

security’ (Alvesson and Willmott 2002: 625-6). This preoccupation with narrativized

identities draws on a broad consensus in the social sciences that life is an enacted

narrative constituted through processes of narration (Giddens 1991; McAdams 1996).

In analyzing such narratives organization scholars have tended to regard them as

grounded in normalized, routinized aspects of bodily self-management, and to be

monitored and sustained by the self, sometimes self-consciously, at other times

without much obvious deliberate or self-conscious intervention (Humphreys and

Brown 2002).

6
We draw in particular on Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power, how this is

exercised through technologies of the self, and the scope that individuals have to

realize their desires through discipline. Disciplinary powers are concerned with the

creation of obedient bodies and are fixed through the discursive practices which

constitute them. Discipline is not an expression of power, but constitutive of it, and

resides in every perception, every judgement, every act. For Foucault (1977: 194) this

kind of power is not merely negative, repressing, excluding, censoring and

concealing, it is also productive: ‘it produces reality; it produces domains of objects

and rituals of truth’. Disciplinary power, exercised through surveillance and dressage

(work which is exclusively to confirm the docility of the governed) is invested in,

transmitted by and reproduced through all human beings in their day-to-day existence:

‘it is discrete, regular, generalized and uninterrupted’ (Burrell 1998: 21). By dividing,

specifying and differentiating individuals into categories of subjects according to

certain standards of normalization it clarifies relations between the individual and the

organization, fabricates individuals as subjects, and preserves social order through the

regulation of members’ personal conduct (Ibarra-Colado 2008; Starkey and McKinlay

1998). As a disciplinary space, the Parachute Regiment was constituted as a way of

knowing, a system of knowledge; and an order, a system of power, through micro-

technologies which produced a known and calculable arena, enhancing governability

(cf. Townley 1993).

Disciplinary mechanisms lead individuals to regulate their own conduct, turning them

into self-disciplining subjects. Under the panoptic gaze an individual ‘becomes the

principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault 1977: 202-3). Power ‘in its actual exercise

7
must be ever constitutive of the subjectivity of the agents of power relations’ (Minson

1986: 113-114), and works not simply by silencing people but by giving them voice.

That is, individuals become not merely reflexively self-regarding but provide

accounts of their selves in terms made available by disciplinary practices. People

produce themselves through technologies of the self such as ‘examination’ (the

constitution of the self as an object that can be measured) and ‘confession’ (the

constitution of the self as a subject which can be verbalized, judged and ‘improved’).

Technologies of the self ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the

help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,

conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain

state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault 1988: 18).

Individuals thus assume uncritically the subjectivities made available to them in

organizations as their ‘own’, and these can become the basis for more active consent

processes, a phenomenon that Burawoy (1985) discusses as ‘strategizing one’s own

subordination’.

Yet power is inscribed within contextual ‘rules of the game’ that not only constrain

but enable action. Rules require interpretation and must be ‘refereed’, so that in

invoking rules there must also be discretion: agency is inherent in the regulation of

meaning (Clegg 1975, 1998). As Foucault suggests in his later work, individuals

create their own selves and realize their desires through discipline. That is,

‘individuals/groups can free themselves from the overarching disciplinary power of

knowledge and realize their own desires in a framework of self-discipline and self-

knowledge of their own making’ (Starkey and McKinlay 1998: 231). People are

constituted as ethical subjects on the basis of self-ordering knowledge that permits

8
them to discover their selves as responsible for their own actions, and thus as free

individuals who may shift the limits that define who they are, modifying and

reconstituting themselves in other ways (Ibarra-Colado 2008: 566). Discipline, then,

may be seen as the necessary price that we pay for realizing our desires, for achieving

certain aesthetic values and meeting certain stylistic criteria (Foucault 1986: 10-11).

Work provides one ‘privileged space’ (Donzelot 1991: 5) in which ‘the subject enters

into its own formation’ (Bevis et. al., 1989: 339), deciphering, recognizing and

acknowledging itself as a subject of desire allowing it ‘to discover, in desire, the truth

of [its] being’ (Foucault 1986: 5).

The focus of our work is on how desired identities were means by which individuals’

identity work was disciplined, and in-so-doing casts light on how these preferred self-

conceptions were regulated by the institution. The soldiers’ identity work was

disciplined not just by a conception of what it was to be a paratrooper, but also by

notions of how paratrooper identities were fashioned by the Regiment. The identities

to which the men aspired, (i.e. kinds of narrative they desired to be able to tell about

themselves), had, thus, two components, an understanding of what it meant to be a

paratrooper and an account of how paratroopers were made. Through an analysis of

their talk about their preferred identities we can begin to understand those processes

which centre on the simultaneous production of empowerment and repression,

commitment and control. The study is an addition to a genre of research that has

tended to highlight the role of organizational initiatives such as ‘corporate culture’ and

‘team working’ programmes in the regulation of identity work (Casey 1995; Kunda

1992). Our particular interest, though, is not in managerial attempts to impose their

9
hegemony, but in how situated participants’ appropriate locale-specific discursive

resources in processes of identity formation and system reproduction (Kuhn 2006).

Research Design

Context

Initiated by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Parachute Regiment came formally

into existence on the 1st of August 1942. Conceived within and shaped by the history

and traditions of the British Army Regimental system, it acquired quickly its own

unique symbols, dress and other military paraphernalia including its motto, Utrinque

Paratus (‘ready for anything’). The Parachute Regiment is today one part of a

Formation (a group of regiments) called 16 Air Assault Brigade and enjoys a national

and international reputation as an elite military unit. In 2006 the approximately 2800

full time officers and men of the Parachute Regiment were spread across three

Battalions called ‘1 Para’, ‘2 Para’ and ‘3 Para’ and a separate Pathfinder Platoon. In

addition, there was also a Battalion of 450 part time (Territorial Army (TA)) soldiers

known as ‘4 Para’ which supported and assisted the regular Battalions in their

operational and peacetime roles through the provision of both fully formed

Companies and individual soldiers. Since 1976 a Parachute Battalion has been

constantly on ‘spearhead’, that is, at the apex of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Order

of Battle (ORBAT) on 48 hours notice to move.

Data Collection and Sample

Conceived as an ‘inquiry from the inside’ (Evered and Louis 1981), the initial

objective of this research was to produce an ethnographic account of the work

experiences of serving and retired paratroopers. The primary data for this research

10
were collected between February 2001 and July 2003 by the first author through 70

semi-structured interviews. We interviewed men who had been recruited into the

Regiment in every decade since its formation, including a mixture of serving (27) and

retired (43) soldiers, those who were or who had been full-time regulars (53) and part-

time territorials (17), those who were or who had been officers (9) and enlisted men

(61). Interviews with serving soldiers were arranged through negotiation with the

Commanding Officers of the Regiment, and we had little control over who was made

available to us. Ex-members were contacted via local branches of the Parachute

Regiment Association (PRA) in Nottingham, Bradford and Milton Keynes, and

official paratrooper reunions. From the large number of people who volunteered to be

interviewed we hand-picked those who seemed thoughtful and had interesting stories

to tell.

For many of our interviewees the attraction of paratrooper identities, and their desire

to pursue these, long pre-dated their formal application for membership of the

Regiment. These understandings of what it meant to be a paratrooper drew on societal

discourses regarding the military in general and paratroopers in particular (Halford

and Leonard 2005: 660). Much of this discursive material – in books, magazines,

films and Web Sites etc. – focused on the ‘extraordinary courage’ of paratroopers, and

championed the view that ‘…when the chips are down, the “Maroon Machine” will

deliver’ (Jennings and Weale 1996: 192). While most of our respondents had been

inspired to join the Regiment by these kinds of media representations and/or chance

encounters with serving and ex-paratroopers, a significant minority (10) of our

interviewees had direct family connections with the Parachute Regiment, which had

influenced their decision to join. These people spoke of being ‘born into’ the

11
Parachute Regiment, and to have been intimately familiar with its history, traditions

and the mentality of paratroopers from an early age. As Coward and Ellis (1977: 3-4)

have remarked: ‘The individual, even prior to his or her birth, is always and already

subject-ed to the structure into which he or she is born’:

I was born in ...Aldershot, the heart of the Parachute Regiment, the son of a
Parachute Regiment Officer. And ...from my first earliest sensible memories
as a five year old, through to my current age of forty three, I have either
been a child of the Regiment or serving in the Regiment’s ranks (Lieutenant
Colonel #42).

The interviews with serving men took place in an office at their barracks, while those

with ex-paratroopers were conducted mostly in their own homes, the home of the

principal researcher, and at PRA venues. We asked our interviewees a broad range of

questions centred on issues of individual and collective identity and their experiences

as paratroopers. For example: ‘what was your first impression of Battalion?’ ‘When

did you think that you were a paratrooper?’ and ‘what are your most vivid memories

of your service?’ The interviews, which varied in length from 30 to 120 minutes, were

recorded onto audio tapes, and fully transcribed to yield approximately 686,000 words

for analysis. The data collected through formal interviews were supplemented by a

much larger number of informal interactions and casual conversations with serving

and ex-soldiers at branch meetings of paratrooper associations, official reunions, and

informal meetings with paratroopers on an almost daily basis. Whenever possible,

these interactions were recorded in hand written notes that enriched the data set. Our

understanding of the Parachute Regiment was also broadened and deepened by a

thorough review of the large and still burgeoning literature on it, television news

reports and documentaries, official and unofficial paratrooper Web sites, and the

official Parachute Regiment magazine Pegasus.

12
Data Analysis

Data analysis was guided by an understanding that language, as ‘perhaps the primary

medium of social control and power’ (Fairclough 1989: 3; Chreim 2006), should be

the primary focus of our attempts to analyze how discoursal practices constituted

subjectively construed careers and identities. ‘Discourse’ refers to ‘the structured

collections of texts embodied in the practices of talking and writing (as well as a wide

variety of visual representations and cultural artefacts) that bring…objects into being’

(Grant, Hardy, Oswick and Putnam 2004: 3). This is not to deny the existence of

materiality, merely to emphasize that meaning is attributed through discourses which

are always incomplete, unstable and contingent formations (Laclau 1996: 44; Laclau

and Mouffe 1985/2001: 111). While recognizing that this is a study of paratroopers’

discourse, the analytical approach we adopted was a fairly conventional qualitative

investigation of transcript and other written materials. Ours was an attempt to

understand a specific way of life through the tellings of the lived experiences of those

who were or who had been paratroopers, and to give our interviewees a voice (albeit

mediated by us) in the research process.

In common with other research based on qualitative data, we analyzed our findings by

circling back and forth between data and concepts using a multi-stage inductive

approach. Our transcripts and other data sources were read closely in order to identify

instances of talk relating to identity. Relevant interview segments were abstracted and

coded following the open coding system recommended by Strauss (1987). Using the

principle of constant comparison we identified large numbers of related key notions

which, over time, were collapsed into broader and more refined explanatory

categories, and tentative descriptions were generated for each category we

13
found/constructed. This was an iterative process that resulted in the categories being

revised multiple times, eventually resulting in a refined list of 62 significant

explanatory codes (e.g., ‘craving combat’, ‘determination’, ‘fighting’ etc.) that

covered a broad spectrum of activities and interests. Using these codes as organizing

labels we wrote a lengthy generalized account of what it was to be a paratrooper. This

allowed us to think again and in more detail about how the codes related to each other

and what important information they revealed. In turn, this led us to engage in a

further phase of category analysis involving processes of comparing, integrating,

collapsing and discarding. As master codes (‘professional’, ‘elite’, ‘machismo’, ‘rites

of becoming’, ‘surveillance’, ‘storytelling’) emerged they were linked both to each

other to assess their coherence, and to the broader literature on identity work.

In analyzing the data we were sensitive to the need to ensure that our interpretations

were made on the basis of a rigorous examination of our transcripts and other source

materials, and sought to guard against systematic bias by ensuring that emergent

themes were confirmed across as many of our data sources as possible. Further, while

we acknowledge that researchers always have an active role in constructing the

‘reality’ that they investigate, in line with Flyvbjerg (2001: 84) and Ragin (1992: 225)

we dispute the bias towards verification with which case study work may be charged.

In this instance we were particularly careful to mitigate this possibility by asking

general and open-ended questions of our respondents and allowing them to talk

uninterrupted. Moreover, data analysis was conducted jointly by the researchers one

of whom had no responsibility for data collection. This said, we should note that the

research was undoubtedly shaped by the first author’s experiences as a member of the

Parachute Regiment for six years, and the second author’s life time of vicarious

14
exposure to the traditions and mentality of airborne soldiers that has accompanied

being the son of an ex-paratrooper. These connections between us and our case study

organization underscore the often made arguments that ‘qualitative social research is

always shaped by the researcher’s own personal values… political and moral

principles’ (Bell 1999: 17), and that ‘writing up ethnography usually means writing

oneself into the account to some degree’ (Cant and Sharma 1998: 10).

Finally, like all research projects, this study has a number of important limitations that

restrict its utility. Our main concern has been with paratroopers’ work identities, and

the many other subject positions which they occupied based on, for example,

ethnicity, religion, age, class, sexuality and as fathers, sons and brothers, have not

been explored. This is significant because it means that we have not examined other

kinds of aspirational identities that the men may have had. Second, the arguments

against the ‘transferability’ of findings and ‘generalizability’ of theoretical constructs

culled from single cases are well established. Moreover, viewed in the context of the

broader management studies literature, some readers will regard the Parachute

Regiment as an ‘extreme case’. While we maintain that our research site was a useful

locale for theory building which rendered identity dynamics highly visible (cf.

Flyvbjerg 2001: 78; Pratt 2000: 458), we appreciate that our findings also reflect the

unique context in which our research was conducted. Further empirical studies are

required to investigate further the importance of aspirational and other kinds of

narrative identities in different work settings.

15
Aspirational Paratrooper Identities

Participants in our study shared a perspective on paratrooper identities as states that

were aspired to. It is important to note that it was a paratrooper ‘identity’ that was the

object of the men’s desire, rather than a military occupation or particular set of tasks

or duties. The same kinds of military actions performed by paratroopers were also

engaged in by other soldiers, notably the marines. Even the act of parachuting, which

is popularly associated with the Parachute Regiment, is a key aspect of the work

undertaken by other airborne units in the British Army. Furthermore, gaining

membership of the Regiment was merely an initial objective for the men, valued in

part because it was only possible to work on a paratrooper identity within its ranks.

The importance of this distinction between paratrooper identities and membership of

the Parachute Regiment was symptomized by the absence of any negative

commentary attaching to individuals’ paratrooper identities. By contrast,

disillusionment, disdain, scepticism, and cynicism about the Regiment were voiced -

for example, regarding command structures and policy changes - even by those who

averred a deep affinity for it. There were also numerous complaints against

supposedly incompetent, egotistical senior officers who, as agents of the institution,

were said to be out of tune with ‘true’ paratroopers: ‘The people in Command were

fucking idiots. They didn’t have a clue how to run a Battalion’ (Sergeant Major #46).

For those who managed to join the Regiment, becoming a ‘genuine’ paratrooper was

described by some as elusive and others as an almost impossible ideal. Even the most

self-confident individual recognized that ‘You’ll never do everything, and you’ve got

to progress week by week, month by month, you know’ (Warrant Officer II, retired

#20). The men’s anxieties regarding their paratrooper identities were symptomized by

16
statements that they had constantly to ‘prove’ themselves, but that there were no

definitive tests: ‘The extent of being a paratrooper is never ending. You feel that you

are a paratrooper at one level, but you go up the ladder, an endless ladder’ (Lance

Corporal, retired #15). For many, ‘To the last years of your Army life you are still

trying to prove yourself a para’ (Sergeant #60). The almost mystical allure of

paratrooper identities for the men, who invested them with rarefied qualities, meant

that many were prone to status anxieties right up until they left formally the Parachute

Regiment:

So you, you don’t feel like you are the finished article, you never feel like you
are the finished article in the Regiment. If you thought you were the finished
article, being a paratrooper, maybe, you know, you get out. You wouldn’t have
the right idea (Private, retired #30).

While there was scope within the Regiment for the construction of a range of different

identities based on, for example, age, rank, ethnicity, marital status, contractual status,

Battalion, specialist skills etc., our interest is in shared understandings of paratrooper

identities which were a centripetal force that bound the men to each other: …you are

all part of one big special club, as, as a paratrooper…I feel like I, I belong to [an]

airborne family (Captain #49). Within the Regiment, paratroopers’ idealized

conceptions of what it meant to be a paratrooper were disciplined by reference to

discourses centred on ‘professionalism’, ‘elitism’ and ‘machismo-ism’, and it is to

these that we now turn. Our analysis focuses on how talk about paratrooper identities

positioned the Parachute Regiment as offering a ‘sense of a process of the

achievement of self through work’ (Grey 1994: 482). Simultaneously, we discuss how

the Regiment was constituted as a set of panoptic techniques and disciplinary

processes which meant that the identities the men cherished (aspired to) were largely

those that were institutionally sanctioned.

17
Professionalism. ‘Professionalism’ was a key refrain that featured in people’s

accounts of themselves and significant incidents which had led them to re-evaluate

their status as aspiring paratroopers:

The Patrol Commander told me to stop this fucking great big bloke, who
seemed to me, twice the size of me. I set me authority on him, and done it
professionally, without waffling, done it professionally. Made me turn round
and say ‘right, that’s it, I’ve broken the ice, I am now a fuckin, Paratrooper’
(Captain #49).

Shared conceptions that paratroopers were professionals supported their assertions

that they enjoyed symbolic, historical, ideological, and institutional boundaries that

effectively separated them from others (Cahill 1999). This was important for the men

who were especially concerned to distinguish themselves from soldiers in other

regiments in the British Army whom they tended to disparage as ‘crap hats’.

‘Professionalism’ was also a label that acted as a disciplinary mechanism which

allowed for control at a distance through the construction of notionally ‘appropriate’

work identities and conducts (Fournier 1999: 281). Understandings of their selves as

professionals inscribed paratroopers into a system of expert knowledge constituting

them as autonomous subjects responsible for regulating their own conduct (Miller and

Rose 1990). The discourse of professionalism encouraged each individual paratrooper

to engage in a ‘labour of legitimation’ (Fournier 1999: 286) by claiming and seeking

to demonstrate ‘competence’ through appropriate action. Thus did the seductive

discourse of professionalism invoke a technology of the self – in the form of an

appeal to self development – which led to an internalized coercion of the self by the

self to develop along prescribed lines and to achieve continuously to ‘a high standard,

a very high standard’ (Colour Sergeant #10).

18
Elitism. Elitism refers to assumptions of superiority, that is, constructions of the self

as better than relevant others according to certain criteria, and often entails claims to

special powers, prestige and privileges. Paratroopers were adamant that they were the

best soldiers in the British Army. References to elitism were associated with a broad

range of assertions notably that they were physically fitter, technically superior, better

organized, and more highly adapted to cope with conflict situations than any other

kind of soldier:

We are an elite. We are above the, the other guys. We’ve all gone… the extra
mile to get here (Private #50).

You are Parachute Regiment. You know that you are the best. ...All these
others seem to look up to you, like you are almost like Gods (Lance
Corporal, retired #15).

Social psychologists have demonstrated that perceptions of organizational prestige

and social identities characterized by high self-esteem promote affective commitment,

active identification and enthusiastic work performance (e.g., Bergmai and Bagozzi

2000). Paratroopers’ sense of their selves as an elite was also a base for self-

discipline, for a form of normative control that promoted a kind of responsible

autonomy that, like Kunda’s (1992: 91) high tech workers, led members ‘to invest

heavily not only their time and effort, but also their thoughts, feelings, and

conceptions of themselves’. In sum, understandings that they were, individually and

collectively, an elite unit not only provided a degree of ontological security, but

disciplined paratroopers to want to accomplish high performance, even when engaged

in seemingly mundane and repetitive work:

We do things faster, for longer and harder. Everything is more and more…
than the rest of the British Army, and that’s the standard which is, is fucking
hard to keep (Private, retired #31).

19
Machismo-ism. Talk about machismo-ism - aggressive behaviour, war, conflict

situations, and combat - was the most frequently occurring resource for identity work.

Paratroopers said that they craved combat: ‘...I think it’s like training for a race and

never running it. …blokes seem to crave it [action], until it happens. ...every Para has

got that (Private, retired #4). The men asserted that they wanted to test the training

regimen they had been through, to see if they had the ‘right stuff’: ‘The bottom line is

that you don’t go through the hell of Depot to sit on some beach and show off your

tattoos. You do it because you need to prove to yourself’ (Thornborrow 2005: 135).

Such comments are testimony to the disciplinary power of these conceptions of

masculinity, what Komisar (1976) refers to as the ‘masculine mystique’, to inform

notions of the self and to guide and shape action. Perhaps most importantly, what this

seemingly relentless discourse on the virtues of being courageous, tenacious combat-

ready troops did was to cue the direct experience of combat situations as essential in

order to achieve (a self-ascribed) authentic paratrooper identity. That is, the

experience of active service was defined by the men as integral to paratrooper

identities, and it was only after this had been gained that many started to feel less

anxious regarding their status:

Probably after the battle of Goose Green. That’s when I must have been sat
down thinking properly on stag [guard] behind a gun thinking “yes I feel I’m
worthy to say now that I’m a paratrooper’ (Private, retired #35).

The Manufacture of Aspirational Identities

The idea that paratroopers were professional, elite and macho/combat-ready was, the

men said, ‘manufactured’ in three principal ways: (i) through ‘rites of becoming’ that

restricted entry to the Regiment; (ii) storytelling, and especially the use of Regimental

history; and (iii) through the maintenance of an informal culture of suspicion and

20
surveillance. Paratroopers talk about how were fashioned from initial application

through to experiences gained in the Battalions and conflict situations, served a

disciplinary function for identity work by constituting paratrooper identities as ideals

to which the men aspired. That is, the aspirational identities (self narratives) which

they told about themselves did not merely concern abstract qualities, many or all of

which might be shared by others in the British Army, they also, and crucially,

involved being able to give a plausible and authentic account of how they had been

made. Being able to self-reference an authoritative account of how they had been

‘manufactured’ was important for the men because it imposed a strict boundary

condition on those who could legitimately claim to be bona fide paratroopers. Any

soldier could claim to be a combat-ready, elite professional, but only members of the

Parachute Regiment could reasonably suggest that they were engaged in an identity

project as an authentic paratrooper. Concomitantly, these descriptions also provide

some insights on how the preferred identities to which the men aspired were produced

and reproduced by the Parachute Regiment.

Rites of Becoming. In the first instance, the aspirational nature of paratroopers was

said to be inculcated by restricting entry to a small minority of those recruits who

wanted to join (Wanous 1980). The Enlisted Men said that army recruiting officers,

and the staff who conducted basic training, attempted to dissuade them even from

trying to become paratroopers: ‘Right from day one, they didn’t want you to join their

Regiment’ (Corporal #37). Entry was further restricted by a series of exhausting

physical tests, generally referred to as ‘P’ Company, and a Basic Parachute Course,

the successful negotiation of which was a sine qua non for becoming a paratrooper.

Interviewees said that these tests, particularly ‘P’ Company, were a mark of

21
distinction which elevated the Regiment and its men above all others: ‘P’ Company is

something that other units don’t have. Doing ‘P’ Company is like the kite mark

(Sergeant #59). These largely institutionally controlled processes of selection, training

and socialization were associated with the award of distinctive items of dress, insignia

and equipment highly valued by the men, and learning a specialist vocabulary, which

reinforced understandings that paratrooper identities had continuously to be worked

on.

Soldiers’ aspirations to become paratroopers were in part, they said, built through

collective hardship experiences. The ‘factory’ [initial training site] was described as a

‘brutal regime’ (Colour Sergeant #10) of physical exertions, kit inspections that might

be continued every hour throughout the night, daily parades on the drill square and

constant seemingly random punishments. The professional and notionally elite nature

of paratroopers was a constant refrain of the instructors who cajoled and intimidated

the men throughout basic training: ‘It was instilled in, into us from day one…that we

were the cream. There was nobody better than us’ (Private, retired #22). Recruits said

that they were ‘intimidated mentally and physically by…the instructors’ (Sergeant

#59) who were intent on maintaining the standards and traditions of the Regiment:

‘You are a robot, and you done what you was told’ (Sergeant #60). This was a regimen

designed to produce physically fit, disciplined and above all, belligerent troops:

‘...you were really excessively aggressive to the point where it was manufactured’

(Private, retired #12).

22
Surveillance. Newly qualified full time recruits were sent to one of the Regiment’s

Battalions where, through verbal assault, intimidation and acts of physical violence

the soldiers made it clear to them they were not (yet) ‘real’ paratroopers.

When you get to battalion, you’ve completed your apprenticeship. Now you
start the real training to be a soldier’ (Private, retired #23).

The importance of these processes for the men was symptomized by their disdain for

those who had not experienced life in a Battalion:

...If people start calling themselves Paratroopers...when they haven’t been

through that system and they haven’t worked in a Battalion for a while, then
they can pretend, they can pretend all they like. And they can think what
they want about themselves. ...But they are not! ...And they probably never
will be. They are just ...wannabe’s (Corporal #67).

New soldiers said that they found themselves at the bottom of the formal and informal

hierarchies, referred to as ‘crows’, and treated ‘like a day one week one Recruit all

over again’ (Colour Sergeant #56). A tradition of ‘crow beasting’ meant that most

found their arrival in a parachute Battalion a harrowing experience:

I joined A Company and ehm you know it was, the guys were, ‘you’re the
crow, go out, do this, do that, make the tea, go get the pizza,’ whatever, you
know were just the general you know, dogsbody. (Lance Corporal, retired
#24).

In addition to these debasement experiences recruits to the Battalions, (especially in

peacetime), found that ‘you were under suspicion…. Every move being watched.

Every word being listened to. You knew it all the time’ (Private, retired, #31). As one

old soldier commented: ‘the blokes [established soldiers] make sure they [new

soldiers] understand what is required…. Won’t accept sloppy standards. Won’t lower

the benchmark’ (Sergeant #60). Long-serving soldiers apparently felt themselves no

less subject to peer-surveillance, and many said that they felt an omnipresent pressure

to ensure that their personal standards (of physical fitness and technical expertise)

23
were maintained, and to prove they were paratroopers: ‘You’d soon get found out if

you let your standards slip’ (Private, retired #34). Similarly important was individual

soldiers’ critical examination of their selves:

‘When you get to Battalion you think “ah, am I or aren’t I [a paratrooper]…I

am, but I am not”’ (Private #61).

That is, the men’s sense of themselves as aspirant paratroopers was sustained not

merely through validation by others, but through processes of internalized soliloquy in

which individuals ‘constantly ‘judge[d] themselves from the perspective of their

phantom community’ (Athens 1994: 528).The constitution of paratrooper identities as

ideals, the men said they ‘ought’ properly and appropriately to aspire to, symptomized

the power embedded in the Regiment as a discursive entity which affected all

members of the Regiment, senior officers included. The Parachute Regiment thus had

panopticon-like qualities in which each individual figured as prisoner and guard,

evaluated and evaluator, a node in a complex information processing network of

mutually reinforcing surveillance (including self-surveillance) and control (Foucault

1977).

Storytelling. The Regiment was described as an intricate storytelling network in which

were traded accounts of what it meant to be a ‘real’ paratrooper through specific

examples of how one ought to behave in conflict situations. Competently telling

stories about one’s personal experience ‘is an essential skill for members of a speech

community’ (Robinson 1981: 58), and learning to author and perform an appropriate

set of stories was, the men said, integral to the process of becoming a paratrooper.

Skilled storytellers, and those who featured as protagonists in others’ stories, became

role models for new young recruits keen to ensure that they met the expectations of

24
their peers and did not violate crucial norms. Those with a gift for storytelling were

people ‘You focused on …and say “I want to be like you.” ...I want to be like that’

(Private, retired #22). Many of these stories found their way onto Web sites and into

books, documentaries and films about the Regiment, and this media industry helped to

sustain an externally located contemporary folklore of paratrooper heroism which, as

we noted earlier, continued to entice new recruits to join. These mostly suggested that

active service ‘was an adventure’ (Private, retired #17) and that paratroopers were

combat-ready elite professionals. For example:

‘We stood up and we run a kilometre down this track getting mortared either
side, hitting the deck, getting up. We were lying down, about thirty of us there.
And we looked at each other “right, what shall we do?”. We was getting
mortared all the time…. So we fixed bayonets and he [CO] said “let’s go for
it!”’ (Colour Sergeant #10).

Many of these stories drew on understandings of the Regiment’s history, and those we

interviewed regaled us constantly with stories of the Regiment’s battle honours. New

soldiers could, for example, expect to be ‘tested’ frequently by established soldiers on

their knowledge of the Regiment’s campaign history. As an ex-Private said: ‘…we can

still show the excellence our forefathers showed…in the war time…. We showed it on

the Suez [canal]. We showed it on the Falklands. We showed it in Sierra Leone’

(Private, retired #29). Soldiers’ individual and collective understandings of

themselves as having ‘a history…second to none’ (Private #68) and that they had a

duty to uphold the good name of ‘the lads who have wore the red beret before you’

(Private #55) were key to conceptions of paratrooper identities as states constantly to

be striven for: ‘…we have strived to [live up to] the reputation of the Regiment…. We

strive hard… to do the best, to do the right thing. And we always do’ (Private #68 ).

The idea that the Regiment had ‘more battle honours and… recognition than any

25
other bloody Regiment in the Army’ (Private, retired #70) disciplined understandings

that ‘real’ paratrooper identities were hard-won:

…the pride of being part of that [the Parachute Regiment], and the honour of
being part of that is enormous. But it is matched with the responsibility to
fulfil the traditions of the Regiment (Second Lieutenant #63).

Discussion

In this section, we consider two broad sets of issues. First, we discuss how

paratroopers’ preferred conceptions of their selves were ordered by the discursive

resources on which they drew, and how these aspirational identities were disciplined

by the Regiment. In so doing, we analyze how selves are made within institutional

contexts. Second, our focus turns to ‘aspirational identities’ as a type of narrative by

which individuals’ identities – selves as reflexively understood by persons – are

disciplined. This leads us to consider briefly the implications of our findings for

conventional literatures on identification and socialization, and the development of

different kinds of selves.

Discipline and Identity. The paratrooper identities to which the men aspired

constituted ideals against which individuals assessed and evaluated themselves, and

measured their progress over time in a quest for personal realization. Through

introspection they examined continuously their progress against institutional norms,

monitoring themselves for discrepancies and failings, in order to determine whether

they had yet accumulated those necessary experiences and were sufficiently

professional, elite and macho. Such evaluations and self-descriptions were confessed

to others in informal conversation and especially the exchange of stories about who

they were and what they had accomplished. Disciplinary power thus resided in

26
paratroopers’ every perception, every judgement, and every act. Notionally

aspirational paratrooper identities were one means by which individuals were tamed, a

process that Foucault refers to as ‘dressage’, which serves the fantasy of a disciplined

society populated by docile, obedient, subjects. Paratroopers’ strategized

subordination in their quest for unassailable paratrooper identities was without end,

and left many with an uncomfortable and lingering sense of falseness and insecurity.

Self-inspection and constant comparison with peers was an interrogative process that

made them vulnerable, requiring them to meet successful performance, instigating a

search for constant reaffirmation of identity, to secure the acknowledgement,

recognition and confirmation of self in practices confirmed by others as desirable.

Our analysis of paratroopers’ talk about their ‘manufacture’ casts light on how

preferred identities were disciplined by the Parachute Regiment and raises important

questions centred on the relationship between individuals’ self-discipline and

institutional disciplinary forces. Paratroopers’ conceptions of their selves and

processes of self-formation constituted in Foucault’s terms a ‘discursive formation’, a

naturalized system for giving meaning to the world which enacted a high degree of

consent to arbitrary institutional arrangements. Paratroopers were subject to a

discourse that limited, defined and normalized the “vocabularies of motive” (Mills

1940) available in the Regiment ‘for making sensible and accountable what it is that

people should do, can do and thus do’ (Clegg 1998: 32). The disciplinary practices of

the Regiment rendered individuals ‘calculable’, i.e. capable of being compared,

measured, trained and corrected - through discourses of the self - with the objective of

normalizing them. Paratroopers spoke of being assessed against benchmarked

performance criteria, of being evaluated, ranked, and passed/failed by others in the

27
Regiment who continuously watched them. Techniques of the self were conducted

under conditions of intense surveillance including cultural practices of moral

endorsement, enablement and suasion as well as more formalized technical and

bureaucratic means. In short, conceptions of what it meant to be a paratrooper and the

techniques of paratrooper production formed a tight web of discursive constraint.

Yet paratroopers were not merely bit-part players without agency. Within the

discursive bounds imposed by membership of the Parachute Regiment individuals

constituted their selves, shifting the parameters that defined who they were.

Individuals are not mere ‘objects’ in ‘truth games’. They are self-referencing and self-

creating ‘subjects’. Of course, the men were reflexively self-regarding in terms made

available by disciplinary practices, but these not only silenced but gave them voice:

‘From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical

consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art’ (Foucault 1991: 351).

Moreover, for paratroopers there was pleasure in work which was a means for self-

fulfilment, and while their work was disciplined, enjoining its practices was the price

they paid for realizing desire. The Regiment was richly illustrative of Lyotard’s (1986:

62) contention that techniques of control work best when they make individuals

‘want’ what the system needs in order to perform. Disciplinary power is systemic,

omnipresent and affects everyone all the time.

Aspiration, Narrative and Identity. An aspirational identity is a story-type or template

in which an individual construes him- or her-self as an aspirant who is (i) earnestly

desirous of being a particular kind of person and (ii) self-consciously and consistently

pursuing this objective. To be a paratrooper meant working on a temporally-informed,

28
reflexively authored self-narrative that integrated an ‘individual’s reconstructed past,

perceived present, and anticipated future’ (McAdams 1996: 298). Aspirational

identities are effects of power which are also creative, producing subjects through

processes of ‘normalization’ (assessment and correction) which ‘insist’ that people

strive continuously to be more prototypically conforming. Such identities harness

people’s needs for public and self-esteem, and societal injunctions centred on the

supposed need for individuals to be ‘successful’ and to ‘achieve’, and constitute them

as disciplinary ideologies which may be powerfully effective. One explanation for

their perceived attractiveness is the extent to which people are uncertain and anxious

about who they are as a result of multiple insecurities – existential, social, economic

and psychological – which intersect and operate simultaneously on workplace selves

(Collinson 2003: 530). In Lacan’s terms, aspirational identities offer a narrative

structure to the fantasy that coordinates desire, a fantasy of achievement that can

never be fulfilled. On this reading, paratroopers’ continuing efforts to make their

selves ‘real’ was one aspect of their lifelong attempts to attribute ‘permanence,

identity and substantiality to the self’ (Lacan 1977: 17).

The aspirational identity narrative template, which includes both a conception of what

it means to be a particular kind of person and an account of how they have been made,

is an addition to the organizational literature on narrative identities (Humphreys and

Brown 2002). A considerable amount of research has been undertaken focused on the

generalized structure and content of life stories (McAdams 1996), and taxonomies of

life stories for modern adults (Gergen and Gergen 1986). Our research supports this

theorizing, and adds to other efforts to catalogue and systematize narrative identity

types (McAdams 1996: 314). An aspirational identity narrative is an ‘epic’ literary

29
form in which an individual casts his (her) self as a hero (heroine) whose life is

punctuated by a series of obstacles/tests which have to be overcome in order to

succeed (Frye 1957). For paratroopers, and most likely for a range of other kinds of

worker, the journey is perilous and success not merely uncertain but (for most)

perpetually deferred; yet this is acceptable because the process of becoming is itself

valued. The investigation of the narrative structures associated with other work

identities may be an interesting avenue for further research.

Our findings complement recent theorisations of identification as ‘continuously

enacted and reenacted’ (Pratt 2000: 476) i.e. a continuous process of ‘becoming’ with

no possibility of final closure (cf. Ashforth 1998: 213). To this it adds an

understanding that the yearning to find meaning may be crystallized in the form of

‘aspirational’ identities which marshal individuals’ dreams and desires. Most

importantly, subjectively conceived processes of socialization, identification and self-

development need to be understood as efforts by individuals to author self-narratives

that render their working lives meaningful: possible and provisional ‘selves’ only

make sense within the narrative frames which people author to situate themselves in

time and space and suture meaning with experience. This study also adds to our

understanding of work as a means of self-fulfilment through a calculative project of

continuous self-improvement (Casey 1995). Such identity work, fuelled by fantasies

of individual omnipotence and immortality (Craib, 1994), may be scripted by a

narrative template which casts work identities as aspirational. Further, an ideology of

self-growth is, as we have shown, not confined to managers and white collar

professionals (Webb 2006: 181) fixated on material success, but may hold sway over

30
any group which, like paratroopers, come to regard their work identities as ‘virtual

consumer goods’ in a market for status and prestige (Wajcman and Martin 2002).

Conclusions

This study has analyzed paratroopers’ talk about both their identity work and

institutional processes by which preferred paratrooper identities were constituted.

While paratrooper identities are effects of power, paratroopers themselves did not

conform to stereotypical versions of colonized workers available in the literature: they

were not docile and vacant-faced or indeed haggard and burned-out. There was also

little evidence for their docility and emasculation (Sewell and Wilkinson 1992),

though some may detect in our data evidence to suggest an infantilizing neurotic

dependence of men on the Regiment (Casey 1995). Recognizing that whom they

were had been impacted upon by powerful institutional forces, paratroopers

nevertheless characterized themselves as ‘smart believers’ who had not been ‘duped’

but ‘reasonably convinced’ (Casey 1996: 334), and claimed responsibility for their

internal standards of self, potentialities and principles by which they structured their

working lives. Theoretically, the idea that there are narrative templates (of which the

aspirational type found here is probably just one), neither erases agency nor insists

that it is treated as the determining force of history. An organization is a system of

constraints that simultaneously discipline and enable the discursive identity strategies

available to members.

31
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