Delivering more than security service : narratives of professional identity in the UK private security industry
type: CreativeWork
description: Organisation and management studies often consider the notion of identity in relation to profession, professionalism and professionalization. What is under-developed is how professional identities are constructed in domains that are contested, under-defined or in transformation. Private security offers a unique research site. Contested yet increasingly legitimised following the Private Security Act 2001, the UK private security industry is under-researched as a site of meaning in professional lives. Using identity as analytical bridge between self and sociality, this thesis investigates the relationship between broader discourses of security and professionalization processes in the development of professional selves at different levels of analysis. Processes of professionalization have been expedited since the founding of the Security Industry Authority (SIA), tasked with ‘ensuring only fit and proper people and organisations deliver regulated private security services’ (SIA 2019). There are numerous stakeholder perspectives that in a fabric of connections inform what might constitute ‘fit and proper’. Challenges to professionalization are numerous and seem persistent: with 90% of the workforce as estimated to be male, the industry provides mostly insecure jobs on low wages for frontline security staff, disproportionally recruited from the immigrant population, and offering little in terms of career structure. Sector stigma seems hard to shed and the industry remains undervalued by state law enforcers and profoundly mistrusted by the public. Nonetheless, scholarly work on security, hitherto mostly located in conflict zones - construing security work as ‘dirty’, ‘stigmatised’, and ‘hypermasculine’ - seems insufficient to capture the complexities and new possibilities for the development of professional selves in modern, UK-based security landscapes. Broadly located in an interpretivist paradigm, and drawing on a postmodern version of grounded theory, discursive mater…
abstract: Organisation and management studies often consider the notion of identity in relation to profession, professionalism and professionalization. What is under-developed is how professional identities are constructed in domains that are contested, under-defined or in transformation. Private security offers a unique research site. Contested yet increasingly legitimised following the Private Security Act 2001, the UK private security industry is under-researched as a site of meaning in professional lives. Using identity as analytical bridge between self and sociality, this thesis investigates the relationship between broader discourses of security and professionalization processes in the development of professional selves at different levels of analysis. Processes of professionalization have been expedited since the founding of the Security Industry Authority (SIA), tasked with ‘ensuring only fit and proper people and organisations deliver regulated private security services’ (SIA 2019). There are numerous stakeholder perspectives that in a fabric of connections inform what might constitute ‘fit and proper’. Challenges to professionalization are numerous and seem persistent: with 90% of the workforce as estimated to be male, the industry provides mostly insecure jobs on low wages for frontline security staff, disproportionally recruited from the immigrant population, and offering little in terms of career structure. Sector stigma seems hard to shed and the industry remains undervalued by state law enforcers and profoundly mistrusted by the public. Nonetheless, scholarly work on security, hitherto mostly located in conflict zones - construing security work as ‘dirty’, ‘stigmatised’, and ‘hypermasculine’ - seems insufficient to capture the complexities and new possibilities for the development of professional selves in modern, UK-based security landscapes. Broadly located in an interpretivist paradigm, and drawing on a postmodern version of grounded theory, discursive mater…
author: den Outer, Birgit
language: en
date published: 2023
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:42:25Z
provider: Oxford Brookes University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Oxford Brookes University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.24384/ytab-3317