Description
Recent Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force recruitment campaigns and diversity initiatives portray the Services as meritocratic workplaces where social ‘difference’ is welcomed. Despite these efforts, research on serving and veteran women, LGBTQ+ personnel and minority ethnicities evidence enduring workplace inequality.
Organisational discourses communicating the ‘ideal’ Serviceperson are underpinned by ongoing institutional commitment to conservative binary assumptions around gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. This systemic endorsement of a particular ideal undermines institutional aims regarding diversity and inclusion.
This paper critically examines the key policy documents which set out the core ethos, values and standards for each of the 3 Services to identify dominant discourses of the ideal military worker. An initial and uncritical reading of these texts suggests that the values and standards therein are categorically neutral; equally able to be demonstrated by any individual. However, this paper argues that the policy documents illustrate an organisational ‘regime of truth’ which privileges a white, middle class, male, heterosexual subject position through leveraging historical, sociocultural and ideological narratives. The positioning of this specific masculinity as having ‘innate and natural’ suitability for military service casts ‘others’ as lacking or liminal based on their (in)ability to demonstrate these preferred attributes.
