Discourses and discursive condition: gold-standard discourses and discursive re-

Gold-standard discourses and discursive re-domination

Throughout the PDU phase, the recruits, to various degrees, picked up local norms and got socialised within the practical community. Their changes in perspectives, habits and attitudes gave rise to a series of re-adjusting and resisting behaviours from the recruits in response to the correcting and regulating practices exercised in the academy. The more acute contestations between formal discourses and deviant ones distinguished the social context at this stage from that which recruits had initially entered.

Having recognised the undesired impacts of PDU community, the training aptly normalised (Covaleski et al., 1998: 296; Foucault, 1977) the recruits that showed deviant thoughts and behaviours, by using gold-standard discourses to re-constitute their understandings of the job and themselves.

On the first day back at the academy, the intake was asked to share their PDU experience one by one, by answering three questions ---- what was done well, what was done not so well, and what was done differently from as instructed at the academy. In response to the first question, recruits tended to recollect, with excitement and

passion, various critical practical experiences as their personal achievement throughout the PDU phase. For instance, many mentioned how they ‘dealt with 8 arrests’ or ‘3 sudden deaths’, ‘calming people down’ well in domestic or burglary scenes, ‘doing multi-tasks’ after a fire accident, ‘took a case to court’ and so on.

Nevertheless, the trainer, though acknowledging recruits’ competence demonstrated in these episodes, re-formulated these accounts within gold-standard discourses, refocusing on organisational prescriptions and downplaying individuals’ unique agency. For instance, she reframed recruits’ stories using vocabulary associated with the formally constructed well-rounded police image, which includes, for instance, ‘show presence of the police’, ‘professional management of scenes’ and ‘relate to victim’s emotions’, and ‘independent decision making’. While the articulations originated from recruits were infilled with sense of ego (Goffman, 1959) and self- esteem, and carried emotional charges, thus underlining individual distinctive agency, the trainer’s reproduced version reframed micro-level value and contribution into macro-level objectives and prescriptions (Covaleski et al., 1998), and therefore abstracted active agency and ‘nested’ agentic individuals into the formal hierarchical structure.

While the debriefing was conducted by the trainer in an apparently reassuring style, fundamentally it was a power-laden practice of identity regulating, which Alvesson and co-authors called the ‘invisible identity cage’ (2008: 17). Through this process, gold-standard discourses were echoed and re-accentuated, and therefore penetrated again into recruits’ self-understanding (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009; Townley, 1993:537).

Likewise, in the role-play sessions at this stage, some student officers were seen apply ‘tricks’ picked up during PDU placement, which are either ‘grey’ or unlawful under the gold-standard regime. One example is putting a foot at the door when requesting a house search to stop people from shutting the police out. Trainers tended to caringly point out to the recruits that they ‘might have not realized the bad effects associated with these practices’, and ‘there could be many better options to choose from’. The relating-to tone rendered corrective feedbacks more likely to be appreciated by recruits (cf. Alvesson et al., 2008a: 16; Ibarra, 1999: 781). Nevertheless, despite the amiable and persuasive manner, trainers’ practices of correction during role-plays

were actually attempting to arbitrarily demolish not only these suboptimal policing practices, but also the fundamental value in the practical regime, which ignored rationales of legitimacy but upheld instrumentalism (Fielding, 1984: 584). By doing so, the training authority intended to dwindle the further-reaching undesirable impacts of PDU placement on recruits’ identity formation.

Moreover, regarding differences between training and placement areas, raised points were mainly concerning ‘less formal’ procedures, such as omission of cautions during taking arrest and flexibility of the time taken to producing paperwork. Most recruits reported a relatively ‘laid back’ ambience in the PDU community. The trainer reiterated to recruits that being ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘well-practiced’ were virtues valued in both the police system and society, and would accordingly would secure legitimacy in their future job. Also, she reasoned to recruits that they were new to the field with limited background knowledge about the local area, and had to be individually accountable for their own actions. It would therefore be safer for the recruits themselves to conduct their jobs as appropriately as possible. Via this seemingly empathetic persuasion, the training authority attempted to ‘re-key’ (Goffman, 1974) recruits’ status of not being fully-fledged or ready enough to approach to job autonomously, by means of which it intended to re-establish its discursive domination among recruits.

Idiosyncratic practical discourses and discursive diversification

After a few weeks’ training, recruits went onto their second PDU placement, where they performed more tasks than in the first placement, still under protective supervision. Since this time recruits were placed with different individual tutors, shift groups and stations from those at the first placement, they were very likely to come across discrepant subculture and norms (Fielding, 1984; Waddington, 1999). By and large, after this second apprenticeship, it became more visible to them that in the operational world, policing approaches, performing manners, working tempos, interpersonal relations and so on, which Van Maanen and Katz (1979) conceptualised as spatial and temporal local norms, could all vary crucially between groups, and sometimes even between individuals.

The divergence could be so much so that carrying out jobs in a way of which the first tutor approved might not be appreciated by the second tutor, or being proactive in

attending incident sites that was encouraged in one PDU station could be seen as rash action in another. Apart from norms in conducting jobs, supervision patterns ---- such as deciding with whom and to which policing assignments recruits should go, whether and how to introduce the recruit before the two of them interact with the public members, and how much autonomy the recruit had in producing paperwork ---- had to be re-cognised and adapted by recruits when working with their second tutor. This was clearly illustrated in the following quote from officer 12, who experienced different fashions of policing between tutors even from the same shift group,

‘Different tutors will give you tips on their styles of policing, which obviously can be a little bit conflicting. So you can get advice from one tutor… will advise you how they would have it done in their styles. And then you work with a new tutor and they tell you how they would do it…’ (Officer 12)

In addition, all tutors and experienced officers faithfully maintained a certain set of macro or micro discourses and attempted to kindly impart them to recruits as ‘truth’. However, the differences among them, as witnessed by recruits, vividly revealed that there was multiplicity, flexibility and contingency, instead of uniformity, even among different PDU groups. This common reflection led to transitions in recruits’ understanding of their identity status and agentic capabilities, and gave rise to changes in their interactions with the authorities in their local social context, which are discussed below.

4.4.2 Structure and practice: relatively controlling structure, constrained yet reflective