Delivering more than security service : narratives of professional identity in the UK private security industry
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 materials were curated and analysed to identify macro level narratives of professionalization. In addition, interactional data collected via semi-structured interviews with 28 participants explore accounts security workers give of themselves to make sense of their working environments. With a key focus on constancy and change, 20 women and eight men were invited to talk about their experiences of working in the sector, issues of professionalization, and perspectives of (in)security more broadly. Presented in three distinct chapters, the findings organise private security narratives at different levels of analysis. The first findings chapter presents narratives at the macro level, identified in extant discursive materials in so-called programmatic texts. Identified tropes demonstrate a shift in vision of (frontline) security as a, by and large, masculine, unregulated, physical role toward security roles reimagined as regulated, intrinsically social, anti-heroic and mundane, culturally and gender diverse, and servicing the needs of customers. However, in the broader UK civil security space the industry continues to think of itself as stigmatised; the quest for legitimacy as a bonafide security provider is ongoing, and the notion of professional security - that which distinguishes the profession from other security providers - remains ill-defined. For the purpose of the development of professional selves, at best there are customer services identities but also distinct sites of silence, i.e. an absence of directives and how to be a professional; at worst, there are negative directives, such as ‘don’t be a criminal’ promulgated, in particular, by the SIA. The second findings chapter presents narrative dimensions at the micro level with regard to the development of professional selves, largely informed by identity talk in interactional data collected via 28 semi-structured interviews. Five dimensions of security careers are discussed: belonging versus “not forever”; serving customers versus ‘dirty work’; uneventful everyday versus (imagined) violence; being invisible versus standing out; and professional selves versus cowboy others. The third findings chapter presents ‘sedimented’ narratives of culturally appropriate selves of which the research identifies three: private security as the helping profession; private security as a feminist project; and private security as global safe keeping. It is proposed that precaritising conditions - both discursive and material - that organise much of private security work offer fertile ground for the development of alternative narrations of professional selves. These alternative professional selves can be construed as a response to a breakdown of recognition by inadequate (customer services), infelicitous (hyper-masculine, dirty), and negative or empty (not-criminal) identities of a previous horizon of normativity. Together, they mitigate particular negative effects such as invisibility. These identity development processes differ from seeking to be a professional. The notion of professionality - giving account of oneself and seeking recognition in precarious worlds of work - advances an understanding of drivers of identity work in the development of culturally appropriate, professional selves. The thesis ends with a number of suggestions for future research on the macro and micro relationship in matters of professional identity.
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