Yrkesofficersutbildning, yrkeskunnande och legitimitet En studie av yrkesofficersprogrammet i spänningsfältet mellan förändring och tradition

Sammanfattning: The new Swedish Armed Forces will be radically different from the previous invasion-oriented defence and the Armed Forces will be a smaller and more flexible organization, better adapted to the international sphere. With the aim of meeting up with the demands of the transformed Armed Forces posture for professional competence, the Regular Officer Programme (YOP) was introduced in the autumn of 1999.This dissertation aims at attempting to illustrate, address the problems and investigate to what degree the basic officer training of the Regular Officer Programme (Swedish: YOP) and the professional competence of newlygraduated Second Lieutenants can be seen as being legitimate within the scope of professional practices of the Swedish Armed Forces, and how this legitimacy can be described and understood.The theoretical framework of the dissertation is comprised of a sociocultural perspective and institutional theory. The five central concepts of the dissertation are: professional practice, institutional rules, professional competence, learning and legitimacy. The empirical elements of the dissertation were collected during 2001 and 2002 and comprise data from six part-studies. The informants were officer cadets after their first year of the Basic Officer Training Programme (YOP) and officers up to the rank of general. The methods for collecting data have been in the form of a questionnaire study, focus group conversations at thirteen military units, three document studies and a study with questions via e-mail. The questionnaire study was processed by using the computer programme SAS. The focus group conversations, the document studies and the answers via e-mail to questions were analyzed and put into categories contents wise according to the sentence category principle in positive and negative statements, respectively, in relation to YOP and the professional competence of the newly-graduated Second Lieutenants. Results show that both YOP as well as the professional competence of the newly-graduated Second Lieutenants cannot be regarded as being fully legitimate among the informants or within the all the professional practices of the Armed Forces.