Structure: less paramilitary but remaining formal and hierarchical

The initial stage of identity construction was situated in the police academy. At the outset, the academy impressed many new recruits as a ‘humane’ learning environment. My observation was similar, in that the academy was less stern and masculine than the ‘paramilitary’ police training schemes portrayed in previous literature. As noted by many long-serving faculty members and operational officers, a lot of traditional deference and disciplinary rituals had been eliminated or simplified at the academy in recent decades. Interactions between new recruits and uniformed instructors no longer followed the rigid pattern of command and obedience as before. For instance, novices did not need to perform ‘posting’, i.e. standing attentively against the wall when coming across people of higher ranks (Chappell and Lanza-Kaduce, 2009; Conti, 2009). Low-rank members were permitted to raise queries about mandates, which used to be unthinkable in a dominantly command culture (Gordon et al., 2009). Additionally, there was no ubiquitous use of harsh disciplines, such as verbal debasement and physical intimidation, individual and collective punishment, to ‘degrade’ and impose compliance on the novices (Conti, 2009; Thornborrow and Brown, 2009). Instead, the training faculty were generally caring and engaging with the new recruits. One telling instance I witnessed was that a trainer persuaded one sick recruit that she needed rest and sent her to the dormitory room during training.

Despite these characteristics, the police academy remained a fundamentally formal and bureaucratic context. Firstly, the rules and procedures of the academy still emphasised order, discipline and conformity, and were rigorously implemented. Among others, there remained an array of rituals that featured more formality than pragmatism. For instance, all members in the academy had to participate in the parade ceremony every Monday morning, during which all recruits were inspected by the inspector. Besides, after being provided with their uniforms and equipment, recruits were required to wear their whole set of uniform and maintain it clean and tidy all the time. Hats must be worn whenever they went out of the training building. In addition, recruits were required from time to time to put away their infrequently used materials, stationary and bags to maintain the tidiness of classrooms.

Moreover, order was enforced beyond the boundary of training occasions, and extended to recruits’ behaviours during off-duty periods. For instance, on the first day of induction, recruits were told to show respect to the administration and maintenance staff in the centre, and those who stayed in the accommodation of the academy were asked to act mindfully and minimise the noises of TV and phone calls at their rooms. Two recruits in particular were sanctioned by the sergeant in charge of training for arguing loudly in the dormitory building and therefore behaving improperly as police probationers. As is shown, in spite of the softened and humane treatment, stringent control on recruits’ behaviours in public as well as private settings remained strong in the training context, which was similar to the ‘encapsulating’ Boot Camp training in Pratt and co-authors’ (2006) study of medical newcomers. Therefore, after a few weeks the academy came to be perceived by the majority of recruits as ‘being very particular about its own things’ (officer 17).

Furthermore, even though more democratic interactions were allowed between recruits and training and managing personnel, the structural distance between them surfaced frequently in training routines, where the authority and domination of the latter was highlighted. One of the manifestations was the faculty’s tight monitoring of recruits. There was, for instance, low autonomy granted to them for arranging their free time after lectures.

‘When they would give you some free time to do some studying, they would not trust us to leave the site. We had to study in that building ... And they’d come around and check on us, and take a few people.’ (Officer 14)

The pocket notebook was used as an instrument of supervision. It has been introduced as a recording tool that police officers normally use to keep track of activities at incident scenes, serving for their post-hoc file building and protecting them from false charges from the public. However, during training the notebook was used as a monitoring device in that recruits were asked to log their training routines therein, and it could be spot checked by any faculty member, who would expect busy schedules entered in the notebook. Not dissimilar to lawyers’ electronic logs of billable activities (cf. Brown and Lewis, 2011), the notebook in effect imposed on new recruits the celebrated principle of hardworking and forced them to constantly conduct self- regulation.

The very practice of notebook inspection flagged the authority’s control power to those newcomers who held unrealistic expectation of substantial democracy and flattened structure in the training context, which is well illustrated by the conversations below.

Officer 04, ‘why it is my pocket notebook being checked?’ (Questioned bluntly)

Instructor, ‘because I can.’ (Smiled but left no room for further inquiry or negotiation)

Besides, the hierarchical power structure was conspicuous in the training context. The spatial arrangement of the training block (Bourdieu, 1977) ---- with classrooms for fresh intakes and the library on the first floor, and classrooms for established trainees and offices for training staff and the higher ranks on the second floor ---- ostensibly reflected the rank-based hierarchy and tenure-determined power structure. By this token, new recruits barely had direct interaction with the higher ranks, whose physical distance and social mystification, similar to the managers in Knights and McCabe’s (2003) study on the call centre, consequently accentuated the grand power held by the authority of the academy.

While trainers tended to create an enjoyable and engaging learning environment, the formal relationship between trainers and recruits remained deeply rooted and came to the fore when breaching behaviours occurred and were critically dealt with. For

instance, some veteran recruits (ex-PCSOs3 or ex-special constables) who hijacked the

lecture by vocally speaking about their own policing experience were deemed disrespectful behaviour, which consequently caused an inspector to give them a warning and a superintendent to speak to the whole intake.

4.2.2 Discourses and discursive condition: ‘all-inclusive’ learning, ‘gold-standard’