%0 Journal Article
%T ¡®Never call me a mercenary¡¯: Identity work, stigma management and the private security contractor
%A Joanna Brewis
%A Richard Godfrey
%J Organization
%@ 1461-7323
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1350508417710830
%X Organisation studies has paid little attention to the contemporary private security industry, despite its enormous recent growth as a supplement to or replacement for state military services in theatres of conflict. To address this neglect, we investigate the workers at the heart of the industry: private security employees or contractors. Amidst widespread and extremely critical media coverage of their activities, we consider the individual contractor as a central agent of contemporary conflict, identifying three main objections to their deployment: a lack of just cause, virtue and professional legitimacy. Using scholarship on identity work and stigma management more specifically, we analyse contractors¡¯ accounts of their employment to identify the communicative strategies they employ to challenge the stigma attributed to their occupation and/or to them as incumbents. Our data set is memoirs written by five British contractors, published between 2006 and 2011. We also suggest that data such as these are under-utilised in organisation studies¡¯ treatment of identity work, because they represent a distinctive form of this work which we label identity writing
%K Contractors
%K identity work
%K identity writing
%K memoirs
%K private security industry
%K stigma management communication
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1350508417710830