Professional identity reconstruction: Attempts to match people with new role expectations and environmental demands

Abstract

Organizations increasingly find themselves in circumstances that generate a need for creating novel identities to deal with novel situations. Through a qualitative study of a professional education programme for military career officers, I explore the reconstruction of professional identities in light of what is perceived as a complex, demanding and changing environment. I found that the programme promoted images and worldviews of an ideal and desired professional identity, which did not match the role transitions and expectations to be enacted by the participants. In addition, the findings show how cultural and organizational dynamics constrained processes of identity reconstruction in the learning context. Implications of the study (e.g. how to theorize and learn from attempts to match people with new role expectations and environmental demands) are discussed. By building bridges across socialization theory, identity work and research on identities in context, and hereby integrating micro- and macro perspectives on professional identity reconstruction, existing theory is elaborated. The article concludes by pointing to the analytical value of exploring how professionals in later stages of their careers struggle to adopt timely and relevant identities and how we better understand the challenges stemming from this identity reconstruction work.

Introduction

The ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative. (McCrystal, 2015, p. 5; Stanley A. McCrystal was the US Army general who commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003–2008)

Despite a growing interest in matters of professional identity construction in organization and management studies, researchers know relatively little about how identities are formed and reconstructed among those who carry out extremely difficult, demanding and dangerous functions: military professionals. Military professionals perform significant roles in society, and military-civilian domains are increasingly overlapping as new tasks are piled onto the military (Brooks, 2016). It is thus crucial that researchers understand the processes by which professional identities change, including the environmental demands and the organizational arrangements that influence these processes.

The changing character of war and contemporary conflicts encourage the military to develop professional identities for the current and future environment (Due et al., 2015; Johnson-Freese, 2012). As the opening quote illustrates, changing people is key to reaching the adaptability and agility that are essential for operating in today’s fast-moving, complex environment.

The think tank Strategic Trends programme, operating within the UK Ministry of Defence, neatly sums up what is at stake here. Success in future conflict depends on people: ‘People – Restoring the UK Edge’, as a headline dictates in a strategy paper (UK MOD, 2015: 38). It is further believed that massive investment in people and in the development of ‘mental agility’ will be a fundamental prerequisite for ‘institutional agility’. Furthermore,

to adapt is to adjust to new conditions and the ability to do this quicker than our adversaries . . . adaptation will be vital at all levels and in all activities to overcome the rapidly developing and varied technological, physical, cultural and institutional challenges we will face in 2035. (p. 34)

The logic here is twofold. First, there is an urgent need to cultivate specific mental skills in military professionals; otherwise, they will struggle and be overwhelmed in a new, demanding environment. Second, it is acknowledged that to develop new approaches, every part of the human being must be explored to respond flexibly and openly to the environment.

This matching argument (environment – people) is also reflected in the work of organization theorists and management scholars, who argue that to address increasingly complex environments, you need to ‘complicate yourself’ so that the variety of personality styles and ways of thinking evoked matches that of the environment (Colville et al., 2013; see also Gioia, 2006; Miller, 2015; Tsoukas and Dooley, 2011; Weick, 1979: 1201). Colville et al., 2013 describe how ‘organizations increasingly find themselves contending with circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity’. Because of this context, ‘new and unprecedented situation gives rise to the need for novel identities to be enacted’ by organizational members (p. 1203).

In this pursuit of novel identities, professional development and education become paramount. Research on management learning and professional development has attended to the potential for processes of learning and development to be a resource in professional identity construction (Reed, 2018; see also Gold et al., 2007; Warhurst, 2011). Nevertheless, we know relatively little about the conditions within which specific identities are produced. This includes key questions on how the performances of organizations and professions are connected to the micro identities processes associated with their participants (Brown, 2018)

The purpose of this article is to explore processes of later stage identity reconstruction, especially the processes that take place in interaction with social actors so that professionals’ identity work is understood as a result of collective efforts. The central research question is: how do military career officers at later stages in their careers strive to reconstruct professional identities for what is perceived as a complex, changing environment and how is this supported or might not be supported in a professional education programme?

To answer this question, I zoom in on military career officers going through a yearlong education programme at a Danish Defence College.

Unlike most other empirical studies that have focussed on identity construction, socialization and work role transition in early career stages, this study explores the processes of professional identity reconstruction at later career stages. The term ‘reconstruction’ is used throughout the study to point to ‘a significant change in a role that a professional has enacted over time and has considered to be self-defining’ (Chreim et al., 2007: 1516). The literature on work role transition and career progression indicates that institutionalized and desirable role changes are normative; they require little if any explanation since they are part of an accepted social order (Ibarra and Barbulescu, 2010: 139). However, this literature does not attend to changes in highly professionalized fields, in which organizational arrangements and external demands make role changes – and the reconstruction of identity – a less than straightforward process. As this study will demonstrate, what is perceived as desirable or ideal role changes is a constant concern in interactions and collective discussions.

Viewed in light of the broader management and leadership literature, this study of professional identity reconstruction and role transitions and expectations in a military context might seem non-conventional. The management education literature, for instance, often focuses on the training of the ‘business self’ (Lezaun and Muniesa, 2017), expert occupations and career workers in institutions of higher education (Augier and March, 2011; Khurana, 2007; Snook and Khurana, 2016; Warhurst, 2011), corporate development and professionalization (Gagnon, 2008; Kipping, 2011; Reed, 2018) and academics and academic identity options (Bell and Clarke, 2014; Crozier and Woolnough, 2020; Knights and Clarke, 2014). However, understood as a critical case (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 230), this study, on one hand, reflects the unique military research context in which it was conducted. Military officers are thought to hold a challenging profession in relation to requirements and changes expanding out from the changeable nature of war and conflict. On the other hand, it is plausible that similar findings appear in other professional fields, and, in particular, in studies of professional development programmes in which people are ‘made up’ and approached with particular ideas of how to operate competently in what is highlighted as uncertain and complex environments. The transferability of findings to other organizational contexts makes the case ideal for studying and theorizing reconstruction of identities in later stages of professionals’ careers.

The article consists of the following parts. In the next section, I outline theory about professional socialization, identity work and role transition, and identities in context, which I draw upon to orient and build theory around processes of professional identity reconstruction. I then outline the research context, describing the characteristics of military education and the development programme with its focus on the refiguring of ‘the military mind’ (Huntington, 1957: 59). Next, I describe the research methods I used to gather, analyse and theorize empirical data. Based on my data, I first explore how the education programme introduces the fashioning of identities and world views, and I analyse how officers experience and articulate feelings of this in the process. Second, this leads me to identify how identity reconstruction processes are caught in cultural and organizational dynamics. In particular, I argue that military career officers struggle with taking on an undefined, presently ‘glorified’ novel identity in an insecure learning context and that this potentially disturbs socialization and adds to a confusing professional identity. Third, I discuss how the study builds and extends the literature on processes of professional identity reconstruction, and I consider the study’s practical implications for the training and education of military officers and the training of other professions. Finally, I outline future research directions. More generally, this study sheds some new light on how professionals struggle to adopt timely and relevant identities and how we better understand the challenges stemming from this identity reconstruction work.

Theoretical background

Identity is constructed in relation to the groups people belong to and compare themselves with, contexts, categories, discourses and social interactions (Ashforth et al., 2008; Hogg and Terry, 2000). ‘Professional’ is an exclusive identity, developed through qualifications, training and socialization, creating social identity boundaries and enhanced careers (Exworthy and Halford, 1999; McGivern et al., 2015). Several theories address how professional identities in organizational contexts are constructed and change over time and how professionals view and enact their social identity.

I identify three literatures as helpful in understanding processes of professional identity reconstruction and how professionals work with particular role expectations, organizational arrangements and external demands: professional socialization; identity work and role transition, and identities in contexts.

Professional socialization

The first strand of literature that pays attention to processes of professional identity construction is research on socialization. The idea of socialization summarizes how and to what extent individuals are meshed with the requirements of a given ‘life-order’ (Lebensordnung) (Weber, 2004a, 2004b). To Weber (2009), the ‘man of a vocation’ or the ‘professional’ (p. 556) is distinguished from the non-professional by ‘his professional equipment of special knowledge, fixed doctrine, and vocational qualifications’ (p. 425). Literature has thus examined the personae particular to the distinctive organizational setting in which they engage themselves and have focused on how professional identities are formed through role-specific dispositions and skills (Goffman, 1968; Hughes, 1959). Central in the extensive literature on medical socialization is a treatment of the prolonged training and education medical students go through and how professional identity formation occurs during the process (Freidson, 2001). While classical studies on medical students’ early career socialization focus on the interplay between the work the students need to accomplish and the acknowledgement of their new social identity, which happens underway in the process (Becker et al., 1961), research on medical residents (next step of training after medical school) describes how residents either ‘crystalize their professional identity’ during residence training (Fox, 1989: 109) or how systemic changes occurred in the residents’ professional identities over time (Brooks and Bosk, 2012; Pratt et al., 2006). For example, Brooks and Bosk showed how tensions in the socialization process are caused by external sources, such as heavy work regulations and commercial values. On that background, the authors argued that residents developed ‘tentative identities’ rather than internalizing a more stable ‘surgical personality’ (p. 1627). Thus, as residents go through the training, they struggled to take on a ‘holistic’ professional identity and experienced numerous identity threats underway, such as questioning their ability to be a good surgeon/medical expert.

One key point from this literature is how early career socialization is influenced by externally imposed regulations, which in the socialization process provoke noise and complaints and have an impact on how professionals’ identities are constructed. However, little research has examined socialization and identity construction processes in later stages of professionals’ careers. Experience and maturity may provide senior professionals with more agency and legitimacy for reconstructing and re-enacting professional role-identities (Chreim et al., 2007), yet, we know relatively little about how specific organizational contexts and institutionalized norms and orientations may influence this process.

Identity work and work role transitions

Another strand of literature which deals with processes of identity formation and change is research, which is often referred to as identity work – defined as individuals ‘being engaged in forming, repairing and strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson 2003: 1165). This literature is typically paying attention to identities ‘in use’ in an ongoing system of action (Snow and Andersson, 1987), with this focusing on the active, temporal and often less straightforward construction of identities in social contexts (Sveningsson and Larsson, 2006). Here, identity is treated as a verb, whereby professional identity is continually reproduced and transformed (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 627). In line with the socialization literature, the work of Ibarra (1999, 2003) has focused on how professionals’ identity changes accompany work role changes and the process by which identity evolves. Advancing this literature, Ibarra and Barbulescu focuses on the impact of ‘narratives of self’ in processes of identity construction during work role transitions (2010, p. 136; see also Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003) and on the function of images of desired future selves and role-modelling strategies in the crafting of ‘provisional selves’ in the course of career transition (1999: 764). Role models, for instance, provide an opportunity for professionals to try on a role and see if it fits (Ibarra, 1999). These models also impact processes of professional identification.Following this line of work, researchers have shown the ways individuals craft and revise their identities to adopt a desired or ideal identity (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009).

In terms of empirical work, several studies have explored how the identity work of professionals is enabled (and constrained) by formal education. Alvesson and Willmott (2002) contend that ‘education and professional affiliation are powerful media of identity construction’ and that the construction of knowledge and skills are key resources for identity construction in an organizational context, ‘as knowledge defines the knower’ (p. 630). Within organizations, knowledge creation and learning processes are entangled with processes that enable identity work (Brown and Coupland, 2015; Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2010; Reed, 2018). For instance, in MBA programmes, rituals of identity transition often provoke intensive identity work. Sturdy et al. (2006) describe in a study conducted in the context of MBA education in the UK how the travel of ideas of management transforms not only the discursive form or content of identity but also the related existential or emotional experience of it, such as a growing self-confidence in new (managerial) work collectives. Similarly, DBA programmes have been studied as liminal spaces; however, here practitioners felt an incoherence between a competent and successful ‘self’ in the workplace context and a less competent and failing ‘self’ in the DBA context (Hay and Samra-Fredericks, 2016).

The studies mentioned above show how training and professional development programmes are important sites for identity work and are formative through their transmission of ideals and discourses of, for instance, management and managerial functions. However, how groups of professionals are ‘being engaged in forming, repairing and strengthening or revising’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson 2003: 1165) is a relatively understudied phenomenon in research on identity reconstruction (Reay et al., 2017). Research tends to focus on individual agency rather than on how professional identities are reconstructed as part of interactions and ongoing collective discussions about ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’.

Identities in context

At a time when changes occur in and across professional contexts such as in medicine, law and schooling, it is important to explore these changes and how they influence professional identity reconstruction, including how professionals understand and perform their roles and functions. One literature stream has produced important insights into how changes in the broader institutional environment change professional organizations and professional identity and roles (Greenwood et al., 2002; McGivern et al., 2015). Chreim et al. (2007) described how physicians’ professional role identity reconstruction is facilitated by ‘extra-organizational forces’. They pointed to ‘the interrelations between organizational systems/structures and their institutional environment on the one hand, and micro-level actions and interactions enabling the reconstruction of role identity on the other hand’ (p. 1534). Notably, the authors found that a framing of role changes enabled role identity reconstruction and that such framing was affected by discourses in the environment and activities in the daily work.

Another stream of more critical literature has attended to how discourses shape and regulate identity. Authors have shown how organizations display a particular version of reality and how this influences identity formation. As noted by Alvesson and Willmott (2002), ‘through explicating the scene and its preconditions for the people acting in it, a particular actor identity is implicitly invoked’ (p. 631). For example, du Gay and Salaman (1992) explored how management ideas and techniques shaped entrepreneurial and customer-oriented personae in public administration (du Gay and Salaman, 1992; see also Grey, 1998; Sturdy et al., 2006). Others have looked at how institutional calls for ‘compassionate’ employees are conceived and implemented in professional organizations (Pedersen and Roelsgaard Obling, 2019). These studies tell little about whether and how these changes affect and are experienced by the professionals influenced by and embody extra-organizational elements.

Linking to this literature, du Gay argues that there is a historical particularity to sociologies of identity (Du Gay, 2007, 2008). For example, what it means to be a professional military career officer varies historically in relation to the conception of the activities of military organizations and the techniques, methods and practices associated with these activities. Following this stream of research, my aim was to investigate how transmissions unfold in a specific organizational context through the application of an array of methods and principles and how individuals experience it.

In sum, I trace the reconstruction of professional identities by building bridges across socialization theory, identity work and research on identities in context. This framework enables us to see how identities are reconstructed in later stages of professionals’ careers; how identity work is meshed with cultural and organizational dynamics in a context of learning, and finally, how identities are worked on according to new organizational ideals and external demands. By building bridges across theory and different levels of analysis, I thus seek to integrate approaches that focus on local processes of identity formation and cultural and institutional contexts.

Research context

The higher command and general staff officers’ education programme (in short, GSE) at the Royal Danish Defence College (RDDC) is the place for mid-career officers selected for advancement in the Danish armed forces. As one directing staff at the academy puts it, GSE is the breeding ground for future generals: ‘All the generals of the army in the Danish Defence, they’re on this wall. The old boys’ network . . ., it really starts here. It is the place for them who would like to be chiefs’. The GSE diploma thus provides for the formation of a privileged stratum within the military office and supports officers’ attempts to be admitted into the circles in the Danish armed forces that adhere to ‘codes of honor’ (Weber, 2009: 241).

As such, the GSE is believed to be the finest educational achievement for officers who are brought there to learn the tasks and responsibilities of staff work. Staff officers are officers who exist to form the staff. This is the body of officers (typically the rank of army captain and above) who conduct the administration and function of the armed forces. They run the daily services and make meritorious planning and execution of plans. This applies whether the staff officer holds a position in the Danish Ministry of Defence, in the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps’ headquarters in Gloucestershire or is enrolled in North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) enhanced forward presence in the Baltic States.

Methods

Research design and data collection

This inductive case-study research was conceived to analyse processes of identity reconstruction of professional military career officers working in the Danish armed forces, and the particular empirical focus was the higher command and general staff officers’ education programme.

The education programme lasted 10 months and mainly took place at the defence college, but also other destinations in Denmark and in Germany were visited as part of the programme (such as an airbase, an international headquarter and some of the areas east of Berlin, where the historical battle between the Red Army and the German Forces was fought in the end of World War II). My field study involved participant observation of operational exercises, classroom teaching, de-briefings, weeklong training tours, visits to ancient monuments, and participation in official rituals, formal ceremonies and more informal social gatherings throughout the programme.

Participants attend the programme in their late 30s. To get accepted into the programme and to get one’s name on the list, it is necessary to have an outstanding efficiency report, a recommendation from one’s superior and approval of one’s participation by the chief of the army. Thirteen participants were taught by a team of six military instructors (directing staff) bearing the rank of major and lieutenant colonel. The directing staff do not form part of any distinct elite; as part of their progression through the ranks, they train and educate their lower ranking colleagues. Thus, a teacher in the general staff officers’ course is both a commander and an educator. He or she is also a staff officer who him-/herself previously has graduated from the course. Typically, the directing staff are only a few years ahead of the participants in the military career system.

Three types of data were collected for this research: interviews, observations and documents. In addition to this, some blog post material was included in the sample. The data collection involved 6 weeks of observation of operational exercises, classroom teaching, de-briefings, official rituals and social gatherings in various places in Denmark and Germany throughout the programme (November 2016–July 2017).

Intense fieldwork provides an opportunity to understand identities in ‘use in an ongoing system of action rather than responses to pre-structured questions in purely research-contrived situations’ (Snow and Anderson, 1987: 1364–1365). This implies that throughout the observations of GSE, I engaged in natural ongoing interactions and encounters with the participants, continuously asking them questions about the procedures and techniques introduced and asking them to reflect on these in relation to the process of ‘becoming a staff officer’. The questions evolved, as I grew more familiar with the participants’ ongoing system of action. Elsewhere I have described how the process of getting to know this system was not easy (Roelsgaard Obling, 2020). Noting that interviews, as Bourdieu (1977) emphasized, are always at some point staged in the interviewer’s interest, instead of referring to the questions asked throughout the study as ‘non-directive interviews’ or ‘unstructured interviews’ (Gray, 2009), I see them as an integrated part of the fieldwork. These interviews were used to gain knowledge of and experience from the field and also worked as instruments to bridge the distance between participants and researcher. In this way, I tried to comprehend who the participants were, based on a practical and a theoretical understanding of the organizational conditions they are products of (Bourdieu, 1999: 613).

At the fieldwork’s conclusion, I conducted digitally recorded, individual semi-structured interviews of 12 participating officers, lasting 60 minutes on average. I also conducted six semi-structured interviews with directing staff. In addition to this, I recorded three 2-hour group discussions with participants and directing staff during the last week of the course. All discussions were taped and transcribed. Most of the interviews with participating officers took place in an office at their workplaces, which are spread out across Denmark, while the interviews with directing staff were conducted at an office at the Defence College.

Furthermore, the following document material from the education programme is included: policy documents from the Danish Ministry of Defence and the Danish Army; learning plans, campaign sketches, current Danish doctrine; PowerPoint decks used at lectures on operational art, leadership and collaboration; and blog posts.

Data analysis

In analysing the empirical material, I was interested in tracing the patterns of points of view as well as contradictions in the participants’ articulated experiences of the education programme and in particular, their thoughts about their professional identities.

I approached the material as follows. Applying a thematic analysis for identifying, analysing and reporting themes within data (Braun and Clarke, 2006), I began the analysis by reading the material (field notes and interview transcript) in its entirety to familiarize myself with the data set. I noted initial comments and paid specific attention to how the participants’ perceptions of work roles and professional identity were woven into understandings of the programme’s processes, methods and curriculum. Using an open-coding process (Strauss and Corbin, 1990), I identified a number of initial codes, which I then collapsed and refined into broader themes. For example, data coded under headlines such as ‘convergent/divergent’, ‘abstraction’, ‘flexibility’, ‘holism’ and ‘openness’ came to be assimilated under the broader theme ‘desired and ideal role-identity’. Furthermore, I focussed on how these role perceptions developed and followed the progression of the education programme. I organized the themes accordingly: (1) from simple training procedures and exercises to more abstract methods, (2) the installation of mental flexibility and (3) commanding and making plans through novel identity traits. These became organizing themes in my data analysis.

The initial analysis revealed a large amount of data related to the social structure of the programme – from talking about loyalty and authority in the military hierarchy, promotion and performance issues, feelings of insecurity, of being watched over and continuously evaluated. Over time, I came to recognize that participants’ narratives of socialization and training were influenced by some significant organizational and cultural dynamics, involving constant tensions in the learning context and the social relationships. Thus, I attended explicitly to these dynamics and how the respondents interpreted and made meaning of these while talking about their professional identities and enactment of new work roles. Following Richardson and Godfrey (2003), I carefully created this part of the analysis reflecting on its potential harm to the participants. I also reflected on my role as an observer in the field and how this may add to the participants’ feelings of being watched over.

In the following sections, I use only illustrative quotes (preserving individual anonymity) to provide insight into professional identity reconstruction and what professional military career officers experience and articulate feelings of in this process.

Findings

From doctrine drills to more liberal education

The command and staff course (GSE) is described by participants as ‘a land military masochist degree’. Others describe it as ‘the hotel of horrors’, ‘the eye of Mordor’, ‘the black school’ and ‘the school for alpha males’. Together the naming indicates a programme surrounded by narratives and history. More specifically, the course is divided into two modules: Advanced Land Operations (ALO) and Component Campaign Planning (CCP).

The first module is focussed on military doctrine learning and training in operative planning and coordination in the context of a military staff organization:

This course . . . it teaches them . . . the hardcore, you know, professionalism, being an officer who makes plans in staff organizations, which ultimately sends people into death. That is why this is the key concern. But you also learn some tools that make you extremely effective at being a good official. (Lloyd, directing staff)

This course is simply about learning to analyse a situation and come up with one or two or three scenarios, upon which there can be made a decision, and to come up with a recommendation about what needs to be done. (John, participant)

The CCP module both extends some of the procedures and techniques taught and trained at ALO and introduces participants to a new set of skills:

They [the participants] move from having a known procedure they can use to fix complicated problems to an environment in which they have so many uncertainties that they can’t apply the known procedure and have to develop it in one form or another to handle the complexity. (Ben, directing staff)

The module introduces, for example, a war scenario based on the 2003 Iraq invasion. The scenario represents what is understood as a multi-faceted, sprawling system, consisting of an assemblage of resources, units, people and tools (on war scenarios in military training, see also King, 2019). This setup is coherent with military operations in, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan or Mali, which have involved joint, coalition and multi-agency contexts and a wide variety of end-states – both non-military and military. The scenario is thus illustrative of the aim and progression of the programme, which is to start with simple, doctrine bounded exercises and then slowly open up the box by complicating the exercises – which are still doctrine bounded but now involve more data to analyse and comprehend and more and different types of people to manage and coordinate.

Whereas the ALO module’s focus was the staff officers’ formal tasks, functions and responsibilities – and the work roles related to this, the second module’s curriculum has a more liberal learning focus and promotes more general skills. Directing staff typically framed these skills as ‘the ability to think abstractly’, ‘developing a sense of different weighting priorities and an ability to balance different needs’, ‘having an eye for a whole’ and ‘learning something which is bigger than oneself and which is part of a larger process’. Furthermore, as expressed by directing staff,

The ambition is to open up the big field . . . an extremely big equation with multiple variables . . . to give access to the big system and not only a part of this system. (Daniel, directing staff)

Here, months into the education programme and its doctrine drills, it is frequently emphasized by the directing staff that

We would like to train people in the insight that the world is uncertain – that the plan one has developed can collapse, but that one can trust one’s ability to develop a new plan based on the knowledge and experience one possesses. (Lloyd, directing staff)

The introduced war scenario training thus requires new, more flexible perspectives on understanding what is happening in the world in a setup in which reality is framed less simplistically than in the education programme’s previous exercises.

Ideal identities and organizational expectations: to be prepared for the unexpected

The progress in the professional education programme relates to a set of fundamental institutional assumptions, which are providing meaning to activities in the field and how collective purpose and practices are framed.

One of the defining features of war is ‘its strong tendency to evolve in unexpected directions’ (Simpson, 2012: 126). War, explains Clausewitz (1993[1832]), ‘is a flimsy structure that can easily collapse and bury us in its ruins’ (p. 136). Furthermore, ‘war is the realm of chance . . . chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events’ (p. 117). According to this view, military commanders must learn to be prepared for all possible outcomes since war in principle cannot be entirely planned. Based on the idea that planning must be conducted with contingencies in mind, the education programme, therefore, ensures that every officer undertaking the programme understands that ‘we will always find ourselves in a dilemma between what we can plan in detail and what will happen on the ground’. ‘Friction can never be removed, but it can be handled’, as continuously repeated by directing staff and participants throughout the classroom exercise:

It is not certain that you . . . you will be a hundred percent sure, but you need at least to, you know, have the will to continue making plans instead of just saying, well, I made a plan, we implemented it, well-knowing that it was made on a wrong foundation, now the circumstances have changed. Then the damn plan may not work at all. However, we need to be able to hold on to this will. (William, directing staff)

The above usage is also reflected in the army slogan ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’, which makes rethinking and adjustments of plans paramount. This learning lesson is also formulated in the programme’s introduction statement (described in a PowerPoint deck), which says that one of the programme’s purposes is ‘to educate officers who can command and accomplish command-led activities in complex environments, in which there is a requirement that decisions are taken during time pressure and without a complete basis for decisions’. Danish military doctrine suggests that

staff work requires the speed, foresight, adaptability and imagination of all officers of the staff. It must therefore never happen that the staff’s work is slowed down or solidified in schematic forms to implement the most formally correct procedure in dealing with the presented problems.

This acquires a form of mental flexibility, which, as one of the participants explains in a group discussion, means ‘that officers at every level must be able to generate new insights and be audacious and be able to confront any changes in tasks and circumstances’. In other words, the officers need to have the mental abilities and skills to improvise beyond the original operational plan if the context and circumstances of the plan change.

A new, more ‘holistic’ identity is introduced midway through the programme to follow the broader setup. Compared to a lower level ‘military mind’ (Huntington, 1957: 59) for which the focus is reliance on known procedures and methods to address and tackle the tactical issues, another layer of values and ideas enter in support of new role perceptions. This is a layer consisting of attributes such as ‘attentiveness’, ‘innovativeness’, ‘comprehensiveness’ and, as participants describe and discuss in a blog post, ‘that one needs to acknowledge that one does not necessarily know the answers’, and ‘it is also important that we have a holistic, open approach, both regarding the mission environment and the collaborative staff work’. Therefore, the classroom argument also becomes that to be able to confront new threats and approach the increasingly complex environment; there is a need for a mind-shift from the actual task at hand to a more holistic approach.

At this stage of the programme, the participants are asked to reflect upon how they can work on their professional identities in relation to the mission environment and how they approach this environment. Especially in the higher echelons, divergence is seen as a virtue, and the commander needs to open towards ‘new language, concepts, and management models . . . while engaged within complexity’ (Zweibelson, 2015: 371). This transition is not easy. ‘We have this idea that we both as individuals are convergent and as an organization – the army – has a convergent character’, a participant explains, and thus ‘we need to change from being convergent to divergent’, as another participant repeats:

. . . to think in wholeness, including the human dimension of staff work and the way one needs to open up towards knowledge development, is also a projection against the way things always have been because people have always been convergent, doing what the head of directing staff orders them to do. (Paul, participant)

During one of the last exercises near the end of the programme, a participant takes this call for including a more open commander identity seriously by describing in his command order how he intends to ‘apply appreciative and situation-specific leadership’. Moreover, he adds: ‘I am open and informal and pay attention to the format of the staff meetings and the advantages and disadvantages with the chosen process format’. Important for him is that ‘all staff are listened to and get time and possibility to influence the operation plan’. Furthermore, ‘that people experience that we all work in the same direction and with the same focus in mind’ and on the individual level ‘that we can finish this work, gaining new knowledge and development as individuals’ (STCH directive, FAK, 2016/2020).

However, as the exercise proceeded, it became clear that the participants were growing more and more frustrated with the situation. Instead of working around questions such as ‘how can we solve this problem?’, ‘what are the challenges?’, ‘what is going wrong?’, they were asked open-solution questions to help themselves find answers and have insights developed based on their individual opinions and know-how. For example, some participants reflected on the appreciative command style in the operation planning process:

Suddenly, everything became somewhat airy, it became policy, it became something blurry without substance; it was around the time when we went from the substantial to the more blurry and loose, we were also introduced to leadership issues . . . a world of laissez-fair. (Anthony, participant)

It ended in frustration, where the atmosphere was a bit tense . . . we felt that the process was set free and our task was to balance between the tactical and operational level, and the directing staff’s role was simply to say in response to this ‘well, are you super frustrated now, that is super good’. (Julia, participant)

One of the problems that emerged in this exercise was how the activation of an open and process-minded command style was decoupled from the task at hand: namely, the operational planning situation. Rather than strengthening the officers’ abilities to embrace complexity and manage it based on past practices and know-how, the exercise provoked a self-scrutinizing reaction on behalf of the participants, who appeared to be perplexed about what was required of them. More process-oriented methods did not balance well with the ‘get it done approach’ in existing operational planning methods. Instead, it added an extra layer to this, giving rise to insecure professional identities and blurred role relationships in the exercise. Thus, the exercise, including applying an image of a divergent professional identity, became both meaningless and ineffective and failed to anticipate a coherent rite of passage for the officers.

Organizational dynamics in the learning context

Previously, it was clear how officers struggled with crafting and enacting new professional identity traits and how the transition from one way of thinking and acting to another was a less-than-straightforward process, partly complicated by recent calls for novel identities. I next focus on the organizational learning context in which the crafting of professional identities occurs, and I analyse how processes of professional identity reconstruction and adaptions to new professional roles and models are supported or might not be supported in this context.

Assessment and control

When I asked participants why we were 6 months into the programme before someone raised their hand in the classroom and asked a question, the answer I got was ‘because we are continuously assessed’. A participant explained how the best operation plan she had ever made was during an exercise where the directing staff were absent and ‘we finally dared to raise our hands and ask critical questions’ (Julia, participant). Another part of this is how the participants are very conscious that they are always speaking in front of someone, trying to figure out what is most convenient to say in a given situation. A participant explains how he

often hold me back from adding something to and joining classroom discussions if I have not totally thought things through . . . so I’m rather conscious about that we at a given moment are handed an assessment from this course. (Paul, participant)

Also, directing staff appear fully aware that someone else considers their efforts and what this entails:

I think it makes great demands on you when teaching here. Greater demands than I have encountered elsewhere . . . So there are many assessment environments present here, really, both upwards and downwards. (Thomas, directing staff)

Written assessments are made on the performance of both the participants and the directing staff. Both groups of personnel need an outstanding record for further career promotion in the defence institution. A directing staff member commented how ‘there are many pages written about me alone’ (Adrian, directing staff). The Danish army is a relatively small-size organization (compared with, for instance, the US army), and the officers carry around in their heads stories of officers both of the same rank and higher in the military organization, of who succeeded and who failed in the education programme.

The endless round of assessment, which marks the education of the officers also here at later stages of their careers, produces at times an insecure and conciliatory learning context, in which dissent is not always welcome. Everyone always has something in play career-wise, which also breeds certain attitudes in the officers seeking to advance; furthermore, it might also affect what specific elements of the participants’ performance and behaviour are positively assessed and concerning what precisely.

In any event, just as participants must continually obey higher ranked officers, department heads, their chief’s chief, their major generals, so, they must prove themselves again and again to each other. The former were typically used as role models throughout the length of the programme, and chiefs from the higher echelons paid frequent visits. By their presence and typically a brief presentation of the importance of military staff work procedures, the visitors mainly validated the programme’s purpose. In addition, some of the visitors overlooked the programme’s exercises and were involved in examining the participants.

That one of the respondents nicknamed the education programme ‘the eyes of Mordor’ might refer to this sophisticated inbuilt system of overseeing and performance monitoring.

The interlocking ties between people also mean that one must take into account that some programme participants one day might be one’s superior and that the role relationships thus can change in more or less convenient ways:

We may well change roles at some point. You often experience that in this system here, for various reasons, then just suddenly, you end up on a level with, or just suddenly is in a subordinated role. (Thomas, directing staff)

The participant here captures the uncertainty created by the possibility of role reversion. The possibility of role reversion is in a military set-up different from other professional or occupational contexts. Here role reversion is coupled with combat situations, in which military officers place their lives in each other’s hands and routinely take extraordinary risks to protect each other:

One thing is the professional and the analytical elements . . . but it is just as much the managerial and collaborative elements. I have to look at them and then say . . . do I want them to be my chief someday, because that may well happen . . . and so in relation to the operating environment, there are some of them, well, that I just say . . . well . . . I simply do not want you to be my superior. (Rosa, directing staff)

In sum, the organizational dynamics in the learning context – here I specifically zoomed in on assessment structures and monitoring – supported the traditional officer roles and role relationships in the military authority structure. For instance, the assessment structures facilitated that participants acted predictably and did not step out of line. The role models confirmed this existing order.

Loyalty and career progression

Among the participants, there is a type of alliance that governs the participants’ relationships, which can be explained through the military loyalty code. Loyalty seems to be understood by the participants as an all-or nothing-concept. A participant explains how and why officers do not want to reveal each other’s incompetence or errors in the classroom:

Now, we’re just so damn loyal to each other, so I’m not sure we challenge the chief of staff very much . . . I’ve experienced that in almost every education I’ve attended . . .. I don’t know if it’s the composition of people or whether it’s something in our culture, that we also have to be loyal to each other, when we stand shoulder by shoulder on the other side. (Ian, participant).

A directing staff member follows up on the issue of classroom loyalty. Here ‘the shoulder to shoulder’ analogy refers to future positions in the military bureaucracy:

They have to live off each other out there. This here is not just an education program and then we say goodbye. Out there, they have to fight for the same managerial positions. When they are in the position, they have to work together. So it is just as much a formative journey for the participants . . .. they need to be able to collaborate for better or for worse. And they are going to live of each other because at some point they sit there as generals, who have to decide what is going to happen in the Danish armed forces. (William, directing staff)

The education programme is thus coupled with network development and career progression opportunities. A participant explains:

That is why this development . . . institution . . . education is so important. Because it helps create the rest of your career with networks . . . It just matters, and that’s probably the way things are in the civilian sphere also; you don’t become anything unless you know someone. Not because it has to be an Afghan system, where you buy your way up, by no means . . . but it is also clear that you have shared some experiences with someone and you know what they stand for. (William, directing staff)

The explanation here points back to the characterization of the education programme as ‘the old boys’ network’. In practice, it shapes and reshapes an arrangement that is crucial for defining both professional identification processes and the long-run career changes of the participants. In the responses, we see how this arrangement holds the participants in a gridlock situation in which they, on one hand, question the kind of regulation and control they experience and, on the other hand, acknowledge this arrangement which makes it possible for some to progress in their careers.

In sum, what I have identified as cultural and organizational dynamics influence the professional identity reconstruction processes of the officers. Furthermore, these dynamics support the training and enactment of traditional military roles but may not be supportive for the adaptation of new identities. Some respondents implied that the organizational set-up got in the way of encouraging them to ask ‘why?’, ‘what are the long-term implications?’, ‘what are the limits to this operation?’ and ‘what are the possible implications also at higher levels?’ Unfortunately, then, the officers were excluded from thinking of their actions as being closely connected to a broader institutional frame – about the impact of assumptions, values and actions on others and from developing a set of ‘critical reflection skills’ in close tandem with their operational tasks at hand (Cunliffe, 2016; see also Johnson-Freese, 2012). As Goffman (1968, p. 11) pointed out decades ago, military personnel lead an ‘enclosed formally administrated round of life’ and the classroom situation is no exception to this or, as the analysis clearly showed, does not remove the effects of this system.

Discussion

In this article, I have explored how a professional education programme for military career officers in the Danish Army comes with the fashioning of identities and worldviews that closely match images and ideals of a new role claimed for military staff more widely. Rather than performing and enacting new professional identities, the findings show, the officers struggled with taking them on in a messy and diffuse formation process. Despite increasing research in professionals and identity, there is little research on how professionals in later stages of their careers are continuously involved in identity reconstruction processes. The presented research aimed to build and enrich theory and practice within this broader topic area.

Theoretical contributions

A brief review of three strands of literature, which I identified as helpful in understanding processes of professional identity construction and how professionals work with particular role expectations, and organizational and external demands, was introduced in this article. In the following, I discuss the article’s contributions as they relate to and develop the existing literature.

Professional socialization

While previous research on professionals’ identity reconstruction at later career stages pointed at the possibility of professionals having more legitimacy and agency in senior roles and thus were better equipped for changes and external pressures (Chreim et al., 2007), this was not evident in this study. In contrast, the education programme signified a fragile moment in the participants’ careers in which their agency for validating and enacting new roles was limited. Building on the professional socialization literature, this study showed how challenges and tensions identified in early socialization processes, such as role transition challenges, also exists at later career stages in highly professionalized fields. Recent organizational changes in these fields, including managerial government policy reforms, introducing restructuring, private-sector style management, measurement systems and cost reductions may increase the level of tensions and instability in professionals’ more senior career trajectories. Future researchers should follow identities on location (in context) so that the preconditions for identity practices and processes of identity reconstruction become more visible. That would include, for instance, studying the impact of new forms of character-building and regulation mechanisms to support these in increasing role and occupational identity insecurity (see, for example, Clarke and Knights, 2015).

Identity work

The formative identity work relating to professionalism in the military learning context was affected by, not least, the hierarchical and authoritative set-up and the use of particular images and ideas of a desired or ideal future professional. In contrast to other studies on professionals’ identity work (Ibarra and Petriglieri, 2010; see also Thornborrow and Brown, 2009), I found that this set-up did not provide an opportunity for the participants to ‘play’ with different identities, but rather constrained this process. By recruiting and using role models only from the Danish Defence and in particular the army, the participants did not get an opportunity to test and play with different roles. Thus, it became another way of disciplining officers into what the organization framed as an ideal type officer.

In part, role models are also a way to establish professional identification (Freidson, 2001). Typically, one would find the establishment of such types of professional identification in earlier stages of the career. Strong identification inducement processes shape the identity of early members of developed professions. However, I found that particularly the use of role models from the organization’s higher echelons prolonged the identification processes to also later stages in professional careers. Moreover, the organizational dynamics in the learning context did not engender different patterns of interaction with role models (external visitors) or other participants. Thus, these models may not enable a change in the officers’ professional identity reconstruction or make alternative roles available in this process.

Identities in context

Institutions and identities are fundamentally interrelated (McGivern et al., 2015). Changing ‘constellations of logics’ may trigger how identities are performed and how people interpret institutions and professional identities purposes and practices (Chreim et al., 2007; Glynn, 2008; Goodrick and Reay, 2011). However, the relationship requires further explanation. For example, we still know relatively little about the conditions under which identities are continually re-conceptualized through changing perceptions of the environment (social, economic, political, organizational terrains) and the qualities and values accompanying given environment definitions.

Through describing a particular version of the conditions in which military organizations operate, such as a chronic state of complexity (Klitmøller and Roelsgaard Obling, 2021), professional identity is reshaped or reinterpreted. When, for example, today’s fast-moving operational milieu and technological innovations are perceived as leading to uncertainty and multiple unknowns, the ability to adapt to complexity and continuous change becomes imperative. This, in turn, invites military academies and defence colleges to facilitate learning processes and education that allocate an important role to changing the mental capacities and skillsets of officers.

While contemporary discourses on making up people for complex environments often allocate an important role to changing people’s mental attributes and skillsets, there is a lack of discussion on how attributes and skillsets are invented and stabilized in specific ways in specific education programmes and practices. Furthermore, the literature has seldom critically discussed the possible effects of attempts to improve organizational and operational effectiveness through changing people by the use of images and ideas of specific types of identity formation (except, e.g. Du Gay et al., 2019; Grey, 1999; Lezaun and Muniesa, 2017), or what kinds of rules and guidelines for getting by individuals face during processes of identity construction, such as established norms about the ‘natural ways’ of doing and seeing things in a particular organizational context (Jackall, 2010).

This article emphasizes the importance of understanding the interrelationships between institutional and cultural contexts and local processes of identity formation (e.g. Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). As Coupland and Brown (2012) write, there are siren warnings that identity studies may become ‘introspective and detached from broader debates’ (2012: 2, see also Brown, 2018). A part of this problem may stem from how investigations of broader political, historical, cultural, economic and legal aspects of identity and identity construction are often not systematically linked to the micro identities processes in organizations that reflect these aspects.

Together, this study highlights how socialization in later career stages can be just as destabilizing as the socialization processes taking place in the earlier stages of professionals’ work lives (see, for example, Becker et al., 1961; Pratt et al., 2006). This issue has not yet been systematically tackled in the existing literature, which foremost focus on ‘less-than-straight forward’ socialization processes in the early stages of professionals’ careers. This study also draws attention to how identity work can be constrained by cultural and organizational dynamics in the learning context. Thus, it adds a focus on the collective element, which is often missing from studies on identity work and its focus on individual agency (see, for example, Caza et al., 2018). Finally, paying attention to identities in context, that is, to institutional ideals and values and external demands, which frame people in particular ways, can enable us to see the difficulties in realizing the reconstruction of professional identities. Furthermore, it can provide insights into some of the counter-productive ways in which we seek to cultivate professionals working in the context of ‘dynamic complexity’ and change.

Practical implications

Attending to the changing-people imperative in current organizational strategies and policies, one might ask whether the presented study’s particular learning milieu is especially suitable for testing, playing with and negotiating novel identities and relationships. The findings of this study showed that the combination of continuous assessment, restricting loyalty and ever-present individual career concerns established a highly insecure learning milieu that left no room for mistakes and, as reported by the participants, anxiety about speaking out and pointing towards alternative solutions to problems. A practical response to this situation might be to bring in ways in which professionals can question their actions and work with others in the classroom for analysis and discussion and not as a separate module (say, in civil universities). That would supplement the traditional classroom setup in professional development with classroom setups equivalent to civil institutions of higher learning.

While I focus on a case surrounding changing people in a Danish context, reforms of pedagogical methods and education programmes are part of the current landscape of military education in many Western countries. Affecting the development of military officers are, among other issues, new requirements and demands stemming from an extended period of stability operations, grey-zone conflicts and hybrid warfare (Brooks, 2016; Raine, 2019). This strategic environment has demanded some significant changes in professional military education and culture. The latter includes, for instance, abilities to interact effectively with multiple governmental institutions and private actors, both internationally and nationally, and methodological capacities in decision-making and strategy work. Future studies on identity reconstruction may benefit from paying attention to how organizational changes that impact this reconstruction are linked and facilitated by the more expansive strategic environment.

Limitations and future research

This research study has a number of limitations. First of all, the research was focussed on a single small-state country (Denmark), a small group of senior professional (military officers) and one learning context (the higher command and staff officer education programme). The research is therefore not representative of the broader military profession or other highly professional fields’ professions (law, schooling, medicine). However, the described limitations provide a platform for further research. First, the study’s status as a ‘critical case’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 230) alerts us to a problem field that reaches beyond its immediate context and brings us face-to-face with attempts to reconstruct professionals during formative identity work in managerial, organizational and policy contexts. Further empirical studies are required to explore the importance of this work and its impact on professionalism and professional public organizations. Second, from studies of professional education programmes, we know that there exist a difference between processes of identity transformation in the classroom and when ‘in the field’ and not under the same learning constraints (see, for example, Hay and Samra-Fredericks, 2016; Sturdy et al., 2006). Future longitudinal research would be able to capture whether the comprehensive, professional identity the military (may) want potentially evolves in ‘natural settings’, such as in the context of international headquarters in combat and non-combat missions. Third, and this brings me back to the quote by former US General McCrystal in the beginning of this article, in which he states how the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative for organizations operating in turbulent environments. If we follow this line of thought, future studies would benefit from exploring how professional identity that deals with uncertainty and ambiguity can be taught meaningfully. Studies moving across a range of professional fields and between micro- and macro perspectives on professional identity would extend our existing knowledge on the difficulties in reconstructing professional identities according to new institutional and organizational ideals and values.

Conclusion

This study points to the implications for organizational theory and practice, as it identifies some of the challenges and difficulties that emerge when professional public organizations try to match and respond to complex environments and circumstances. In the studied case, ideals and expectations of novel identities came in a rather abstract formula in the specific procedures, role models and exercises introduced in the education programme. Thus, attempts to match people with operational environment appeared to be a destabilizing factor in the reconstruction of professional identities. In addition, the findings emphasized how significant organizational dynamics and boundaries constrained the processes of identity reconstruction. This influenced how the participants understood and enacted their professional work roles, functions and tasks.

The study has broader implications for the management and change of organizational processes of professional identity reconstruction. Attention towards the impact of contemporary discourses on ideal or desired professionals on the reconstruction of professional identities would allow professional organizations to revisit professional development programmes and evaluate methods and expected outcome. Furthermore, on a more critical note, attention towards managerial and organizational incentives that promote novel professional identities would allow professionals to react to the changes and modify its controlling and regulative effects.

The presented narrative of an increasingly complex and uncertain world should in future research be followed attentively because it pushes organizations to come up with new techniques, methods and identities to adapt to this reality perception. This article demonstrates that this adaption in combination with a distinct organizational context affects the formation processes of individuals.