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While the strict rules and rigid hierarchical structure in the academy attempted to control and regulate new recruits within this specific domain, the discursive avowals were set out to standardise newcomers’ thinking and behavioural patterns in a far- reaching way, so as to establish organisational control at a distance (Fournier, 1999;

Townley, 1993). As widely noted in existing police studies, police forces invariably aimed to prescribe formal and ideal behaviours and procedures for new intakes to follow throughout their career via a pedagogical and ‘didactic’ training scheme (Van Maanen, 1973).

As also remarked in the literature, the inculcated formal principles could be somewhat idealistic and artificial, and could simplify realities into a right-or-wrong dichotomy that does not resemble the real work. In result, the principles are subject to contingencies in practical policing context (Bittner, 1965; Fielding, 1984, 1988; Van Maanen, 1973, 2010). Whereas, these idealised principles are still predominantly advanced at the initial training stage for their significance in identity conversion. On the one hand, the exaggerated and dramatic behaviour standards (Goffman, 1959: 19) and well-rounded identity template constituted by these principles sharply demarcate the becoming-officers from their own past status, and distinguish them from the general society that they hold responsibilities to protect and serve (Conti, 2009; Dick, 2005; Fielding, 1984; Van Maanen, 1978; Waddington, 1999). On the other hand, those formally issued principles constitute straightforward and clear-cut criteria for newcomers to easily reference and consistently apply, relatively speaking, when high discretion, ambiguous tasks and intangible outcomes undermine direct and micro control and management (Bittner, 1965; Fielding, 1984; Manning, 2008; Van Maanen, 2010).

This common feature of police initial training was found to be prominent in the academy. Specifically, legal justification was cherished as an essential principle of policing. Solid knowledge of legislation and procedure was avowed as essential for justifiable policing conduct and comprehensive education around legislation was considered vital for recruits to build up professional credibility. Under the influence of this set of discourses, recruits were propelled to re-cognise commonplace issues through legislative definitions in a rigorous and precise pattern. The basic concept of ‘theft’, for instance, was defined as a type of crime that strictly meets five conditions simultaneously, which meant all these five aspects had to be assessed by police officers before any judgement and action was taken.

Also, drawing on the significance of legal legitimacy in policing, the training staff frequently stressed that through meticulous learning newcomers could acquire

concrete knowledge foundations and develop ethical working styles, which would grant them a more legitimate position than a lot of long-serving officers in the force. By instilling a sense of superiority in police newcomers regarding their prospective identity in comparison with old-timers and common citizens, the training authority aimed to attract new recruits to invest their aspirational identity in the current training programme and to adhere to the meticulous and detail-focused learning style it avowed. The technique of envisioning desirable identity with the aim of determining members’ identity construction efforts adopted here was analogous to, among others, the use of collective ‘elitism’ in the British Parachute Regiment (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009:364) and the use of aspirational ‘career’ in consultant companies (Grey, 1994). These cases share the commonality of privileging one identity in conjunction with one regime over all alternatives, which will be further explained later.

Additionally, the recruits were differentiated (Covaleski, et al., 1998) within the cohort according to their performance in legislation study. For instance, the formative examinations were largely constituted by questions on definitions, and thus laid great emphasis on accurate grasp of details. Recruits who failed an exam would be spoken with by the trainers, which was taken as a warning sign in the cohort., whereas, those who performed well in the exams, came early or stayed late to do revision, or took notes scrupulously would be established as peer models within the intake. Through structured mechanisms as well as informal articulations, the core value of striving to become an all-round officer was strongly reinforced. Importantly, given the massive amount of details and constant changes in legislation, this principle demanded that recruits continuously concern themselves with legislation even after they had graduated from the training. The inherent infinity and elusiveness (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009:355) of this prescribed all-round identity rendered members perpetually inadequate to reach the ideal identity, and propelled them to govern themselves with the principle regardless of the situated context.

Along with legal justification, work ethics were also strongly emphasised by the

training authority. The encoded ethical principles4_{, developed by College of Policing,}

were the first thing introduced in the training programme, and were then reiterated in each section of legislation training and embodied in the prescribed policing procedures.

4 _{Code of Ethics 2014 published by College of Policing includes the following main principles ----}

For instance, the stipulated procedure of conducting arrest was encoded into the

‘GOWISELY model5_{’, which directly embedded the core ethical principles of}

‘accountability’, ‘fairness’, ‘objectivity’, ‘respect’ and so forth. In addition, training faculty’s frequent reference to the ‘intense public scrutiny’ on the police in the present society was aimed to heighten recruits’ sense of collective social image and individual accountability (Conti, 2009). The external pressure and responsibility for the collective underlined in these articulations further reinforced the vitality of ethical working conducts.

Moreover, the role-play practices6 were not merely exercises in technical

execution of policing tasks, but, more importantly, an opportunity for the training authority to check and correct on recruits’ manners and attitudes in job delivery before recruits joined the shifts. The ‘public members’ in the exercises, normally played by instructors, would deliberately act in an uncooperative way, to stimulate recruits’ reaction to difficult situations. Therefore, whilst these role-play interactions took place in an enclosed training setting, they were intended to invoke recruits’ presentation of the policing role in the front-stage, i.e., facing the ‘outside audience’ (Dick, 2005; Goffman, 1959; Manning, 2008; Van Maanen and Katz, 1979). For this reason, instructors gave evaluation both on technical skills and, more importantly, professional mannerism. Consequently, although student officers were told to ‘be yourself’ in the role, instead of being a robot, the ‘oneself’ was not actually expected to be the spontaneous self, but someone else ---- the ‘subjectivity’ of the formal regime that privileges work ethics (Knights and McCabe, 2003: 1602). In this vein, through role- play performance and evaluation processes, work ethics were further stressed and penetrated recruits’ practices. Given that the ‘ethical’ policing practices taught in lectures and expected during role-plays demanded perfect embodiment of the ethical norms and tolerated no compromise, they were often referred to by recruits as ‘gold standards’.

However, while discourses of all-inclusive learning and gold-standard policing potently governed the training context, they were not monolithic, given that both self-

5 _{Grounds, Objective(s), Warrant card, Identification, Station, Entitlement to receipt of copy of form,}

Legal powers, You ---‘you are detained for the purposes of a search’.

6 _{Practical exercises with student officers working alone or in pairs, conducting policing tasks on}

members of the public acted by trainers. There were 7 practical role-plays in the 30-week training, including stop and search, house search, vehicle search, suspect interview, victim interview and so on.

contradictory elements within the training and dissonant messages from veteran recruits emerged throughout the training, albeit not significantly.

Firstly, the principle of all-inclusive learning was self-defeating when trainers sometimes implied that certain legislation content would be tested during exams but not frequently used in real work. This happened when some recruits were scrupulous about small details of particular laws. Given the time constraints and limited teaching resources of the training programme, trainers unavoidably made the above kinds of suggestion with practical considerations in mind, which was in opposition to the avowal of the training regime that learning at the foundation stage should not be reduced to only that with obvious regular practical application. Moreover, veteran recruits previously exposed to day-to-day policing made comments, openly in class and privately between peers, that while some taught issues were relevant routines, others were only rare occurrences and therefore ‘adjacent information’ (Officer 06).

Secondly, when it came to specific practical issues, the gold-standard procedures were found by recruits to be too vague to guide problem solving, and too idealistic to allow action taking. One obvious example is making a detainment, where speculative judgement based on mediocre information and short-cut actions were unavoidable and quite commonly adopted in real-world policing. Given that such slightly rule- breaching aspects were often involved in practical details, trainers, in order to avoiding contradicting the gold-standard discourses, would not elaborate in great details on the tacit processes, but often glossed over the tricky part by using the general term ‘professional thinking’. As a result, some novice recruits reported being confused about what was the right thing to do. Again, in informal communications, veteran recruits tended to speak about how overly formal and idealistic the prescribed procedures were, and how policing jobs were performed in discrepant ways at local stations.

Although the dominant regime could not totalise the training domain due to these contradictory, inconsistent and dissonant elements, it still strongly governed the formal training processes. On the one hand, the training faculty leveraged on recruits’ novice status and the attempt of obtaining credibility (Ibarra, 1999; Van Maanen and Schein, 1979). Specifically, they privileged the avowed principles as the only behavioural reference that could ensure recruits a legitimate position under the judgement of

various inside and outside audiences (Fielding, 1984). On the other hand, they imposed on recruits a vulnerable and ignorant identity status. To wit, they explicitly disqualified localised practical norms (e.g. labelling them as ‘bad habits’) and accentuated that the limited experience of recruits disabled them from telling good from bad, right from wrong. In this way, recruits, especially the rookies, were trained to cast doubt on informally spread articulations.

These discursive practices jointly marginalised deviant voices from individuals and devalued knowledge produced in the practical world, thus unifying discourses in the social context in adherence to the all-inclusive and gold-standard principles.