The Transferable ‘we’: Axes Of Identity For The British Infantry Soldier

Introduction

The Joint Officer’s Mess [1] was comfortable but not luxurious, as befits such a place in an operational theatre. Sprawled in one of the easy chairs was an officer of one of the Guards regiments. His small china coffee cup was on the occasional table at his elbow and he was reading an English newspaper flown out from UK the day before. Round his waist, outside his uniform ‘jersey heavy wool’ and performing no obvious function, was a webbing belt. An officer in the Royal Air Force approached him. “Excuse me,” he said, “we don’t wear belts in the Mess”. The Guards officer looked up, clearly slightly bemused. “Oh,” he said, politely, “we do.” And he returned to his newspaper and his coffee.

Both individuals told me afterwards that the other had been extremely rude to them but they were not going to make an issue of it [2].

This small incident is redolent of many interesting social issues. It tells us something of life in a mixed-Service officers’ mess. It tells us about some of the echoes of home life that are preserved in large messes in operational theatres if at all possible (easy chairs, occasional tables, china coffee cups). It opens up ideas of culture-clash between Services. But this paper concentrates on the small word ‘we’ which was used by both participants in this exchange but put them poles apart.

The main interest in the use of this word is that its meaning is always precise (‘myself and those similarly situated’) yet out of context it means nothing and the meaning flexes with changes in context. For example, members of a crowd of football supporters might join together in celebrating a victory in singing ‘We are the Champions!’ on a Saturday evening but by Sunday morning they will have fragmented into a plethora of smaller, mainly residence- or family- based groups each of which form the most immediate ‘we’ as the individuals wake up and start their day. Yet on most occasions, its meaning is unambiguous and understood by all concerned in its use. Even in the incident above there was no doubt about its meaning. Although it was used in different senses as an axis of rebuke and counter-rebuke, the difference in meaning in each use was clear to both parties.

Such considerations have led to the writing of this paper, which seeks to identify the different axes on which an infantry soldier [3] in the British Army might use the word ‘we’ and its derivatives (and, in some contexts ‘I’ and its derivatives), and thus express his [4] identity.

It has to be said early in this paper that the issues that this investigation has raised are both many and multifaceted. We can do no more than visit some of the most important issues here, leaving a more detailed analysis to what could certainly be a suite of papers.

Research basis

This paper is founded on social anthropological research carried out for a series of studies into the organizational culture of the British Army at unit level. It was started in 1974 and continues to date. For much of its length it has been extensive, rather than intensive, with observations being made on an ad hoc basis in support of a general research aim, but over the past ten years it has been more closely focused on the production of a series of research papers including a PhD thesis [5]. The two major axes of the research were participant observation and individual interviews (mostly between thirty and ninety minutes) with over 120 British soldiers of all ranks from private to lieutenant colonel, complemented by a small number of group discussions.

Gaining access to the units was made easier because I, as researcher, was a serving Army officer and thus an insider, but it was necessary to bear in mind throughout the research that my status as a serving officer would affect the context in which the data were gathered.

The methodology for the study and discussion of my status as an insider of senior rank are fully discussed elsewhere [6]. Suffice it to say here that the potentially distorting factors were explored and allowed for as far as possible and the fact that researcher and researched shared some the basic perceptions and assumptions turned out to be a positive advantage. In particular, the research results are in harmony with the social milieu as experienced by both researcher and researched, as evidenced by the fact that every soldier to whom they were presented agreed that they represented their lives in a form that they recognized [7]. This demonstrated that the results stand the test articulated by Sanger:

‘Analyses of the relationship between events and people achieve greater validity if participants who have been observed in the research, recognize themselves, their motives, their actions and their rationale in the researcher’s recordings and reconstructions.’ [8]

Identity and boundaries

‘Identity’ within this paper is taken to mean an agent’s perception of who he or she is, and who those similarly situated are. There is a working assumption that although each agent is a unique individual, with a unique set of experiences, this perception of identity is affected by the cultural context in which the agent is immersed. If we follow Bourdieu, a person’s identity can be seen as part of their habitus, a set of enduring dispositions:

‘in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, [which] tend to guarantee the “correctness” of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms’ [9].

Identity can be seen as deeply bound into the individual actor, not under his or her conscious control, and the product of their experiences. But is this to say that it is monolithic?

Identity is far from monolithic. The Guards officer at the start of this paper was a father and a brother, a staff officer, a member of a regiment in the British Army, and my friend, among other social roles [10]. Rather, it is multifaceted, being transferable according to the situation of the moment, and the bulk of this paper will explore the various axes on which the meaning of the word ‘we’ moves in common usage in the context of a British infantry unit.

Given the potential number of social roles that any individual may take, be they an infantry soldier or not, it is necessary for practical purposes to put a boundary round the subject matter for this paper. This boundary is drawn round the social group known as the ‘unit’, a body of between four and six hundred soldiers in a formed and organized grouping with a hierarchical structure of rank and responsibility and divided functionally into sub-elements with specific tasks. In the British Infantry, the subject of this paper, a unit is called a ‘battalion’.

The Infantry is the main forum for this investigation because it is one of the largest discrete groupings in the British Army and it would make the paper unnecessarily complex if we were to look at the British Army in toto. However, it would be as well to note that the Infantry are in many ways representative of the British Army as a whole, at least at the large scale level.

The British infantry battalion has many of the features described by Goffman as typifying a ‘total institution’ [11] in that it is a place of both residence and work where a large number of individuals lead a formally administered round of life in a common family of contexts. Unlike many social groupings, military units have clearly defined physical and social boundaries, membership is unambiguous and the members both work and live together for extended periods of time during operational deployments and exercises. As Kier says of the US military, it ‘creates an encompassing environment, integrated around collective goals and relatively isolated from civilian life’ [12].

The boundary of a battalion is not of course as absolute as that which surrounded the mental patients studied by Goffman: soldiers have lives outside their barracks and their exercise or operational deployment area, and many of them live in married quarters close to their places of work. However, for our purposes it provides an unambiguous line of demarcation that is significant in the lives of the people round whose lives this paper is written.

We are therefore about to explore issues of identity within the context of the British infantry battalion.

Social structures in the infantry battalion

One of the main products of the research underlying this paper has been the characterization of a series of social models or conceptual frameworks which can be used to describe and analyze and predict British soldiers’ behaviour, and explain it in retrospect. An important concept underlying these models has been the concept of ‘social structures’. This concept owes much to the classic concept of ‘social structure’ articulated most notably by Durkheim and his followers in that it postulates patterns of social interaction which have a discernible form and are influenced by cultural norms [13]. However, in the sense used in this paper and in contrast to Durkheim, ‘social structure’ is not seen as an empirical reality but rather a useful element in a model. In this sense ‘social structure’ is modelled as a shared body of ideas, rules and conventions of behaviour which informs groups of people or individuals how to organize and conduct themselves vis-à-vis each other. The concept provides a useful means of portraying the background to, and framework for, daily life.

Classically one of the main objections to ideas of social structure has been the implication that individuals are somehow bound by the structure to behave in certain ways. These objections have led to the articulation of ideas about ‘agency’, the ability of each individual to make up their own mind how to act. Agency, in this sense, conceptually frees the individual from the shackles of social structure. There is no space here to treat this debate at length: I can do no better than to refer the interested reader to Anthony Giddens’ treatment of the area in The Constitution of Society [14].

As far as this paper is concerned, it is assumed that individuals go their own way through their lives as free agents, using social structure as a reference. It is useful to liken the situation to that of a walker using a map: the map represents ‘social structure’, capturing as it does the main features of the terrain over which the walker intends to go; the walker represents the agent, free to make his or her own choice of routes on the map or even to disregard the map entirely; and the act of walking represents the agent’s process through his or her daily life.

Initial attempts to create a model to capture the social structure in British combat arms units were fraught with difficulty because the soldiers’ behaviour appeared to differ markedly in different contexts. For example, individuals who were on first name terms at one moment in the context of the officers’ mess, with every appearance of warm and friendly interaction, a few moments later stood stiffly to attention and called each other by rank and surname in the context of summary jurisdiction. Similarly, individuals from different sub-units who lived in close proximity in a barrack block would spend time and effort scornfully expressing their differences but would co-operate strenuously and cheerfully in a sports team.

The analytical problem was resolved by modelling not one ‘social structure’, but a plurality of ‘social structures’ [15]. All the contexts encountered appeared to cluster into four major categories, each with its associated ideas, rules, and conventions of behaviour, and these were treated as separate but contiguous social structures, each with its own set of attitudes, behaviours and expectations, as follows:

The loyalty/identity structure [16], which is manifested most obviously in a nesting series of different sized groups which are defined by opposition to and contrast with other groups of equal status in the formal structure of the unit. The structure itself, the ‘body of ideas, rules and conventions of behaviour’, consists in the attitudes, feelings and expectations of soldiers towards these groups and their membership. These attitudes and feelings can be effectively captured in the concept that ‘we are the best’, at whatever organizational level the ‘we’ is placed.

Keywords for the loyalty/identity structure include: belonging, ‘the best’, ‘we/us’, ‘our team’, battle-honours, badges, cap-badge.

The formal command structure, which is the structure through which a soldier at the bottom receives orders from the person at the top. It is embedded in and expressed by the hierarchy of rank and the formal arrangement of the unit into layer upon layer of organizational elements. It contains the mechanisms for the enforcement of discipline, for the downward issue of orders and instructions and for the upward issue of reports, and it provides the framework for official responsibility.

Keywords for this social structure include: bull, drill, orders, obedience, salute, punishment, shout, stiff, parade.

The functional structure, which consists in attitudes, feelings and expectations connected with being ‘soldierly’ and properly carrying out ‘soldierly’ activity. Where groups are formed to carry out such activity, they might exactly reflect the formal command structure (which provides an easy and quick means of creating any group within a unit) or they might be independent of it. For example, an infantry platoon (a basic element in the infantry command structure) tends to carry out military functions on exercise and operations as a formed body. In contrast, a ‘rear party’ which remains in barracks while the rest of the unit is away (perhaps on leave or on an operational tour of duty) is usually made up of soldiers from all over the unit, brought together into an ad hoc grouping.

Keywords for the functional structure include: ‘doing the business’, ‘getting stuck in’, shooting, military skills, kit, tabbing, guts, ‘go for it’, going without sleep, career courses [17].

The informal structure, which consists in unwritten conventions of behaviour in the absence of formal constraints, including behaviour off-duty and in relaxed duty contexts.

Keywords for the informal structure include: friend, mate, mucker, chat, banter, relax, smoke, share, drink, confide, food, time off.

It is this model of social structures that we will bring forward to examine axes of identity.

Social structures as a means to identify axes of identity

It has previously been demonstrated [18] that this conceptual framework can be applied to the examination of British soldiers’ behaviour at regimental duty [19]. This paper develops its use to explore issues of identity in the special case of British infantry battalions. Two key questions are posed:

• Does the model provide a useful tool with which to examine axes of identity within a British infantry battalion?
• Is the model sufficient to identify all axes of identity in this context?

Question one: does the model provide a useful tool with which to examine axes of identity in a british infantry battalion?

This section explores the effectiveness of the model for examining issues of identity in British infantry battalions through a brief analysis of such issues using the model as the framework.

‘Identity’ is an obvious element in the loyalty/identity structure. Soldiers have full membership of a large number of groups, in a nesting series (in the case of an infantry private soldier in a rifle company: fire team, section, platoon, company, battalion), and express loyalty to and identify with each of them in appropriate contexts. However, it is also clear that a soldier cannot focus his allegiance simultaneously on all the potential groups formed by the loyalty/identity segments to which he belongs. It is therefore a feature of the loyalty/identity structure that the appropriate focus for loyalty is determined by the group against which his group is being compared or opposed at any one time. Two illustrations from the sports field will demonstrate this point:

• It is theoretically possible for an infantry platoon to produce such a fine football team that the same individuals form not only the platoon team but also the company and battalion teams. A soldier from that platoon would be correct in cheering for it by name in an inter-platoon match but not in an inter-company or inter-battalion match. At such matches he would cheer for his company and his battalion respectively, in spite of the fact that the members of the team are the same on all of the occasions.
• In the more usual case, the members of teams of larger groups are drawn from all the available smaller groups of which it is composed. Members of a battalion football team would probably come from all companies in the battalion, and the company teams from all three platoons in the company. A soldier on the touch-line (let him come from 5 Platoon, B Company) therefore finds himself cheering on members of his platoon in a game against 6 Platoon, members of both 5 and 6 Platoon (the former opponents) in a game where B Company plays against A Company, and members of all companies, including A Company, in a game against another unit.

These examples not only illustrate the way that groupings are structured and loyalty and identity are transferred according to context, but they also highlight one of the most distinct features of the loyalty/identity structure, which is its flexibility. The size and scale of the segment of the moment is determined by the segment that it is being compared with, or is in opposition to, and this changes with changes in context. Thus in the course of a working day an individual can find that his active segment in the loyalty/identity structure changes many times. For instance, a soldier may find himself parading with his platoon in the morning, attending a company briefing mid-morning, supporting the battalion sports team in the afternoon, and being part of his section quiz team in a bar games night in the evening.

Soldiers can, therefore, find themselves in opposition to a particular individual at one moment, when their loyalty/identity groups are in opposition, and in cooperation or combination with the same individual a short time later when their loyalty/identity groups are in combination against a larger, structurally opposed group.

This is not easy to describe, and it may appear both complex and highly contingent but there is no doubt that soldiers follow the rules captured in this model without any particular mental effort and without necessarily being aware of the complexity of what they are doing. Take, for example, this extract from the infantry soldier James Lucas’s book Experiences of War: the British Soldier. The individual is remembering an occasion from the campaign in North Africa, using the flexibility of the first person plural (‘we’, ‘our’) effortlessly to transfer the identity of the groupings referred to from battalion to section.

‘We were relieved in those positions by a unit from the 1st Division and then we moved to a place between Medjez el Bab and Peter’s Corner. The positions we were now holding were called “The Basin” because the area was a number of low hills surrounding a low-lying piece of ground. At ‘O’ Group our Platoon Commander told us that Jerry [the Germans] was just over two miles away to the east ... our Section Corporal told us that the Hermann Goerings were expected to attack us...’ [20]

There can be no doubt that powerful issues of identity flow from the attitudes, expectations and behaviour that this social structure seeks to capture. Take this extract from an interview in 1994 with an infantry soldier. I had been asking the interviewee about his leisure time and he had told me that, although many of his friends travelled a long way from the barracks at weekends he preferred the local area where he had a girlfriend. I asked if he and his girlfriend were contemplating marriage and he had replied not: they had a pleasant but shallow relationship:

Interviewer: “So you enjoy each other’s company, but that’s as far as it goes?”

Soldier: “Oh I do like Charlie Company. Charlie Company’s the best company in the Battalion.”

Interviewer (slightly baffled): “What makes you say that?”

Soldier: “’Cos it’s the best bunch of lads and that. The lads are brilliant you know. They’re good, and all the platoon sergeants and all the full screws [corporals] are good [?They’re] fair. If you work with them, they’ll work with you all the way, you know.”

This non sequitur must have appeared reasonable to the interviewee. It was concluded that he was so keen to talk about his sub-unit (Charlie Company) that he had thought that I had changed the subject to enable him to do so. His identity as a member of Charlie Company was apparently, in the context of the interview, stronger than his identity as a boyfriend to the lady who lived nearby.

Apart from an individual’s identity as a member of particular groups within the series of formal organizational groupings within the battalion, there are two further aspects of loyalty and identity which also needed to be modelled within this social structure. The first aspect is what I have called the ‘loyalty hot spot’, an organizational level that attracts an exceptional level of attention and social and personal commitment. This might be linked, in the context of what Siebold calls ‘the standard [social psychological] model’ of cohesion, to what has been called ‘organizational bonding’ [21]. I believe, however, that a social anthropological analysis has the potential to render a richer picture than this social psychological one of the nature of such foci of loyalty and identity and am engaged in ongoing work to compare and combine the advantages of such approaches [22]. In the case of the Infantry, this is the battalion, the level, for example, where historically there have been special informal titles which the members bear with pride as ingredients of identity. They usually refer to some notable incident in the past or what its members see as the battalion’s special characteristics (‘the Vikings, for example, or ‘the Poachers’ [23]). The second is what I have named the ‘residual focus of loyalty’, the level at which an individual identifies himself in the absence of rivals or comparators. In the case of the Infantry, this level turns out to be the Regiment, the organizational level above the battalion. This organization encompasses all past and present members of its battalions, and has its own command and staff structure for internal and ceremonial matters. It is also the level at which details of uniform policy are decided, so members of the same regiment wear this identity collectively on their bodies when in military dress [24]. It is an interesting characteristic of the British Army that, according to my observations, this level is generally privileged over the higher levels of organization (in our case, the Infantry and the British Army), so, for example, in the absence of any comparator an individual will identify himself as ‘a Royal Anglian’ rather than a ‘member of the British Army’ or an ‘infantryman’. A concrete example of this effect in operation is in the anecdote at the start of this article, where the Guards officer was exerting his Regimental identity over his identity as a member of the Joint Officers’ Mess by his adherence to his Regimental order of dress rather than the mess dress code.

The loyalty/identity structure therefore provides an obvious and rich axis of identity encompassing membership of shifting, combining and recombining organizational segments, a loyalty hot spot and a residual focus of loyalty. Unsurprisingly, this social structure is the richest in themes of identity, and has been privileged in this account, but the others also contribute significantly to the paradigms of identity within the battalion. Let us now briefly visit the remaining three social structures to seek out other axes of identity. This visit must of necessity be brief to stay within the space available but it should not be inferred that they contribute disproportionately poor grounds for constructing or embracing identity issues.

The formal command structure defines the size and structure of the nesting series of groups within the battalion, but its chief contribution to issues of identity is not organizational but is to do with process. In common with all professional armies and many other organizations, the British Army is a disciplined force bound by formal rules. These rules cover not only all aspects of daily routine but they also define and enforce certain physical movements and postures and the use of words that are unique to the soldier. Certain situations, for instance, demand the use of formal positions of the body as defined in the Drill Manual [25], and individuals can be seen regularly exchanging formal greetings through the medium of salutes [26] and formally prescribed terms of address.

The attitudes, expectations and behaviour modelled in this social structure provide a number of ingredients of an individual’s identity. First, they provide each individual with a unique position in the battalion through its formal organization (or order of battle—‘orbat’). There is only one section commander of 3 Section, 2 Platoon, for example, and only one Number 2 rifleman in each section. There is only one Adjutant and only one Chief Clerk.

Second, all members of the unit understand that they are all subject to the same sets of formal rules and, palatable or not, this immersion in discipline is a feature that distinguishes them from ‘others’ (in this case, non-military people) and therefore contributes to their identity as a body of soldiers.

Third, formal parade occasions are strongly correlated with the loyalty/identity structure in that they provide a means of exercising and acting out issues of identity. Each battalion ‘owns’ certain pieces of military music which are played on every ceremonial occasion in which it takes part, some battalions parade with animal mascots, and all formally celebrate a battalion day (St Patrick’s Day for the Irish Guards, for example, and Albuhera Day for the First Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment). In the particular case of the Infantry, there is also the matter of the Colours, (usually) two silk flags [27] that are carried on formal occasions and have on them the symbols of the battalion, the Regiment, and the Crown. The possession and wielding of Colours are an important axis for identity for the Infantry because, although they only appear on formal military occasions and are therefore not often seen, they carry powerful identity symbols. They are unique to the Infantry: no other part of the Army has ‘Colours’ in quite the same way. They are unique to the Regiment: Colours of battalions of the same Regiment bear features in common that are not shared with any other Regiment. They are unique to each Battalion: each battalion’s Colours carry a unique assemblage of symbols in the form of crests, graphic designs, script and, in particular, battle honours.

Moving on to the functional structure, we can see that it too provides a locus for powerful ingredients of identity in the British Army. One compelling set of ingredients comprises some of the defining features in the idea of ‘the soldier’. A generalized self-image of soldiers is that they are people who carry out military activity, who wield weapons, who put up with harsh conditions, who triumph over difficulty so that the ‘mission’ is successfully completed, all of which can be assigned to this area in the model. The British Army is both formally and informally proud of the name ‘the Professionals’, and this identity can only in reality be expressed in soldierly function. For infantry soldiers in particular, function is associated with two strong axes of identity. First is their particular gloss on the concept of ‘soldier’, which they typically see as reaching its purest expression in the roles of the Infantry (such as to take and hold ground, to engage with the enemy ‘up close and personal’). Second, in functional contexts the individual takes his identity from his role in battle. He is a ‘mortar man’, a ‘rifleman’, or a ‘section commander’, for example.

The fourth social structure, the informal structure, comprises attitudes, expectations and behaviour that are not written down or formally prescribed or endorsed. It is highly complex and regrettably cannot be captured in any detail in the space available in this paper [28]. Instead, a small number of aspects of the informal behaviour of British soldiers from a potentially vast field are highlighted. These aspects are chosen because they have been observed to contain statements of identity but they are illustrative only. In this respect, the material applies to the whole of the British Army and does not have special reference to the Infantry, but, by the same token, what provides material for identity for any part of the British Army applies to the Infantry as part of the global whole.

First, let us consider the use of names, arguably the premier locus for individual identity. Each person has his or her given name, but in the British Army (as in many other organizations) this is frequently distorted in some way or other to provide a nickname. Robbins, for example, might well become ‘Robbo’, Jones ‘Jonesie’, Miller ‘Dusty’, White ‘Chalky’, or Brown ‘Charlie’. Other nicknames might refer to personal appearance, ‘Tubby’, ‘Skinny’, ‘Nosey’, and so on, and still others might spring from particular incidents in the (maybe forgotten) past—‘Bleep’, ‘Blunder-boy’, ‘Nosher’, ‘the Prince’ or whatever. One persistent thread in this area is that nicknames frequently have a punning element on at least two levels: Private Pine is running to fat, so a nickname of ‘Porky’ Pine emerges; Private Parker has a large nose and is a curious individual who likes other people’s business, so he becomes ‘Nosey Parker’; Private Flower likes to fight, so he becomes ‘Bunch’ (as in ‘bunch of fives’). Such names provide individuals with their distinct identity as persons in their military environment. They originate in informal contexts, though other considerations, notably rank differences, will affect who uses them to whom and in what context.

Second, we have the interaction of identity issues with prescribed places for informal interaction. It is a long established custom that individuals above the rank of private soldier belong to messes where they eat and in many cases live [29], and which therefore exercise an aspect of group identity. These messes are in essence formally sanctioned clubs or societies in which the members decide the rules of conduct within bounds set by senior personnel and the limits provided in Queen’s Regulations [30]. They provide a forum for individuals to behave in a relaxed and informal fashion and they are expected, as institutions, to develop special ways of doing things which contribute to a sense of separate identity for each one. The Warrant Officers’ and Sergeants’ Mess, for example, can always be distinguished from the Officers’ Mess but the ingredients of the difference will differ from battalion to battalion.

Third, we may consider spontaneously arising but long lasting informal groupings that generate and express an alternative identity to that conveyed by the formal military system. A single example from a wide field will serve as an illustration. This was a group of four private soldiers in a unit who called themselves, and were known as, ‘the Smartie Gang’. This group were self-confessed rogues but (at least in their own mythology) were seldom caught and disciplined. There was a mostly jovial tension between them and their sergeant major until the normal cycling of personnel finally dispersed them [31].

Apart from providing axes of identity in its own right, the set of norms and ideas modelled in the informal structure also provides a means to express and play with identity issues. Such activity provides amusement that is usually embraced by the authorities as much as by junior personnel. A representative arena for playing with identity issues is that of songs and chants performed at soldiers’ informal celebrations. To take just one example from another vast and under-explored field, in the ironic chant ‘We are Warriors’ a leader starts by proclaiming rhythmically in a deliberately thuggish and silly voice “We are warriors! We got a rifle … and a bullet” and the audience repeats the words after him. This chant both laughs at and embraces ideas of what might be called ‘warrior-hood’, and is sufficiently rich to merit its own paper.

A further, highly informal, area that is used to express or address issues of identity is the creation of graffiti by soldiers, though this is yet another area that has not yet been systematically explored. By its nature, graffiti is very seldom found in the open spaces in a barracks as it is a disciplinary offence to deface public property. However, the isolated confines of the ablutions, and especially the lavatories, provide a secure and virtually uncontrolled locus for the anonymous writing of graffiti of any kind. In an unpublished analysis of soldiers’ graffiti in the 1970s I found that statements of identity featured strongly in the ablutions I examined (as did statements about sex and association football).

Jokes and anecdotes told in informal situations also provide a means to express identity or to play with identity issues. Jokes which in other contexts might refer to fools (‘a man walked into a bar… “Ouch!”) or national characteristics (“A Scotsman, Englishman and Welshman ….”) can undergo a metamorphosis into such statements as “There were three Colour Sergeants…” or “A Gunner walked into a bar…”). Anecdotes might celebrate characters in the battalion, pour scorn on members of other units, or play with any aspect of the military life. Again, this is a rich but under-explored area that would repay further research.

We can see, therefore, that even by such a brief analysis the model of the four social structures has potential to be used with advantage to examine issues of identity in British infantry battalions. We can therefore give a positive answer to the first of the two questions posed earlier. But does the model provide a sufficient tool for all issues of identity within the battalion?

Question two: is the model sufficient to identify all axes of identity in the british infantry battalion?

This question is of course more difficult to address than the first, because there is no equivalent of the model to give structure to the investigation: it is always difficult to search for what is unknown, or to know when the limits of the unknown have been reached. After investigation, however, at least two relevant issues emerged, both of which affected the soldiers in the unit but which had their centres of gravity outside the compass of the unit and therefore outside the model.

The first issue is an obvious point, but one that needs to be stated. The model is constructed for use in the social scientific investigation of issues within a British Army unit and has proved successful for this purpose. However, it cannot be expected to touch with any precision any aspects of identity that flow outside the unit’s social boundary. Like all practical models, it has limits: for example, it cannot provide any help in investigating issues of identity to do with unit member’s family life, his life in the local community, or clinical psychological issues of identity that might be affecting him at the time. Its usefulness in any particular case is heavily therefore dependent on the comparative importance of the identity issues that engage with contexts outside the unit compared to those that fall within it.

The second issue is a possible exception to the first. When the unit in question is part of a larger organization, the model promises to contribute towards helping in the investigation of the perception of outsiders by members of a unit. There is a widely-observed tendency for any group to construct outsiders as ‘the other’ – to perceive them as people whose identity and characteristics are socially alien in some way, and often inferior. For groupings within the unit this tendency to construct an alien and inferior ‘other’ is mitigated by the flexibility of the loyalty/identity structure, in that groups from the same unit who are rivals at one time combine and cooperate at other times thus systematically limiting the creation of permanent divisions (as we have seen above). However, where such rivalry and cooperation are not combined in an overall system (as with the case of most people outside the unit), strong unit organizational culture can lead to the building up of an inflexible construction of ‘us’ [the unit] versus ‘them’ [‘the other’, everybody else]. Thus it is perfectly possible for such important people as those civilians whom the soldiers are expected to protect or manage, or NGOs, or allies (with whom the soldiers are expected to cooperate) to be constructed as sufficiently ‘other’ as to qualify for less consideration as ‘us’. The model may be used to contribute to a better understanding of how such constructions can come about by highlighting the lack of common ground between ‘the other’ and any or all of the social structures in the unit.

The second issue is less obvious, but is an important further aspect of identity. It concerns the effects of common experience.

It is well known that those closest to the enemy tend to look down upon those in safer situations. As Richard Holmes has put it, ‘Every war produces its abusive description of rear area personnel, from the First World War German army’s Etappenschweine to the REMF (Rear Echelon Mother-Fuckers) of Vietnam.’ [32] These feelings tend to be so strong that we need to note that comparative distance from the enemy is an important extra factor bearing on what the model might predict as axes of identity. This aspect might of course be analyzed simply as part of the functional structure within a unit if it did not have the equal and opposite effect of drawing individuals sometimes to identify on this axis with the enemy (who are of course outside the unit and therefore outside the model). There is a long history of individuals and groups sharing an identity with the enemy without compromising their fighting spirit. One example will suffice from D-Day in the Second World War. A British sergeant, Reg Webb, remembers,

‘Just 50 or 60 yards in front of me a Spandau [German machine gun] was firing to our right … I jumped up and ran at the machine-gun post, firing short bursts from the hip. I was on them before they knew what was happening. I shot two of the occupants and, shouting “Hande hoch!”, the other six gave themselves up. I ran them towards the track with their hands on their head … before I left them I noticed one of them had a sort of band around the bottom of his sleeve and on it were the words ‘Africa Korps’. I said to him, “You Rommel’s man?” He said, “Ja”. Pointing to my Africa Star [medal ribbon], I said, “Me Eighth Army.” It was a bit like Tarzan and Jane. I shook his hand and went back to what was left of 17 Platoon.’ [33]

For a brief moment, their common experience in North Africa united these two enemies to the extent of a handshake in the middle of the larger battle. In the moment of that handshake the word ‘we’ would have embraced friend and foe alike but have excluded other members of the German machine-gun crew and British platoon who had not been in the Desert as well. Such a situation is not touched by the model.

Conclusion

The investigation carried out in this paper has revealed that ‘identity’ is a complex multifaceted and dynamic issue in the British Army (using the Infantry as the base case). The meaning of the word ‘we’ is very largely dependent on context, and this context can vary from moment to moment across a wide range of possible categories. The model of social structures set out earlier provides a useful simple and clear tool in identifying many of these contexts and in exploring the issues embedded in the various axes of identity. However, by its very nature it excludes most issues of identity outside the context of the unit, except that it may have a contribution to understanding constructions of ‘the other’.

We may conclude therefore that the model is a useful tool for investigations of this kind. Although it has been applied to the special case of the Infantry in this paper it is transferable at unit level to any part of the Army for the investigation and analysis of elements of organizational culture. However, given its prime focus on life in the unit and its exclusion of aspects from the wider context in which the unit is embedded, it should not be treated as sufficient for all or any purposes. The investigator who wields this tool will find that it simplifies his/her task but (s)he must remain sensitive to possible influences and issues that arise from wider contexts. With this proviso (s)he may use it with confidence for matters which affect soldiers at regimental duty in the British Army to address any area where British Army organizational culture may be a confounding or enhancing factor. As an illustration, and perhaps as a marker for the future, the following two examples are areas of current interest that appear to be open to benefit from such a treatment.

The first is the use of the model to assist in the field of systems engineering as it is applied to the acquisition of military equipment for the British Army. It can be used by MOD and Industry as a means to investigate the organizational cultural consequences of the introduction of novel technical systems, and to ensure that as far as possible they are in harmony with the existing self-image of the eventual User and what they feel to be important. In this respect it would be a useful instrument in Human Factors Integration under the new ‘Organizational and Social’ domain.

The second use of the model would be as a tool in planning organizational change in the British Army, particularly if it is on the radical scale of the Future Army Structure as it affects the Infantry. An appreciation of the organizational culture of those undergoing the reorganization can do nothing but benefit the planning of such changes which are likely to become heavily enmeshed in cultural issues and have unexpected consequences [34]. Even if those planning such changes are themselves soldiers, as is often the case, such a framework as this paper provides brings issues into the light that may be felt but barely articulated, for this is in the very nature of organizational culture.

References

Authors

An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, Toronto, 1-3 October 2004.

Dr Charles Kirke retired from the British Army after 36 years of service (including seven in Defence Research and six as a military member of staff at the Royal Military College of Science) in 2004. His PhD (Cranfield University 2003) is in the organizational culture of the British Army at unit level. He is currently working as Lecturer, Human Factors Integration, in the Centre for Human Systems at Cranfield University (Defence Academy of the United Kingdom), and has an abiding research interest in military organizational culture.