At the beginning of the twenty-first century a burgeoning global private military sector is increasingly involved in areas of defence and security that, up until recently, were popularly thought of as being within the monopolistic preserve of the nation state. Finding itself at the vanguard of profound political and economic change, today’s Royal Navy is increasingly reliant on relationships with the private sector that only thirty years ago would have seemed unimaginable to many commentators. As naval shipbuilding, dockyard refitting, logistics, training, and even warship ownership and manning, move from a unitary state to an increasingly self-organising private sector bounded by a differentiated and decentered polity, this thesis is concerned with boundaries of elite discourse on legitimacy in the political economy of Royal Navy and British naval sea power and their implications for New Public Management theory. At its core, the study presents original research into the attitudes of fifty elite opinion formers directly concerned with the discourse of Royal Navy modernisation and profiles their ideational boundaries concerning the political economy of force and violence. The thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by presenting empirically and framing theoretically the ways in which elite naval attitudes to the political economy of legitimated force have changed and are evolving. The research is important because it challenges what many commentators have come to believe to be an a priori function of the nation state, namely, the monopoly use of force, with the actual views of those opinion formers who currently hold positions of power and influence in and around one of its core ‘ideal type’ institutions: the Royal Navy. The research is also significant because in attempting to clarify the conceptual boundaries of this elite discourse, it also presents a powerful critique of New Public Management with reference to the problematic dimensions of time, economic complexity and socio-political power.

This thesis mobilizes a feminist critique to examine the ways in which New Public Management (NPM) represents a gendered discourse. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, NPM is mapped as a discursive field in order to tease out its dominant and subordinate discourses. The tensions between the dominant discourses and between the dominant and subordinate discourses are examined. The discursive themes of NPM are then engaged using a feminist post-structuralist framework in order to develop a feminist critique. From this critique, it is argued that NPM discourses reinscribe dominant masculinity as well as challenge the Weberian model of bureaucracy by reconstructing a gendered division of labour that takes place entirely within the public sphere.