Researching the Military

Helena Carreiras, Celso Castro, Sabina Frederic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317402619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Researching the Military focuses on the experiences of researchers who study the military around the world.

It explores the historical, social, institutional and personal factors that frame research and scrutinize the way knowledge in this area impacts society and policy. More than merely analyzing research experiences (yet necessarily including them), it is also about the experiences of researchers, their position with regard to the object of their studies, the institutional context where they work and the way their research impacts the academic and policy-making fields in the respective countries. The common theme to the various chapters is reflexivity, a conscious effort at addressing the conditions of research and the position of the researcher and the research participants in that interface. By collecting diverse experiences of researchers from across the world, this volume aims to enhance reflexivity in the field of military studies and to encourage the exchange of knowledge between the academic field and the military arena.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, research methods, sociology, social anthropology and security studies, in general.

1 Reflexivity and the sociological study of the military

Helena Carreiras and Ana Caetano

DOI: 10.4324/9781315682259-2

Introduction

The idea of reflexivity – understood as a surveillance tool in research – has been present in the social sciences for a long time. However, its use has increased dramatically over the past four decades, with a profusion of scholarly works, perspectives and debates leaving no doubt about its renewed salience. According to some critical perspectives, the same does not seem to be the case in the social scientific study of the military (Higate and Cameron, 2006). In order to examine such contention, this chapter aims at uncovering the meaning and importance of reflexivity for the study of the military and report on the state of the field in this regard. It starts by addressing the role of reflexivity in social scientific research, exploring academic contributions that underline the social nature of research processes and the need for incorporating a reflexive gaze over all stages of scientific practice.

In a second part, the chapter explores the way reflexivity has been present or absent in military studies, namely in the subfield of armed forces and society, through a selective review of existing literature. It argues that far from being a constraint, reflexivity is the very condition for the production of social scientific knowledge and for asserting the validity and reliability of research results. However, it also warns against inadequate uses of reflexivity as a rhetorical strategy or a narcissistic exercise.

The role of reflexivity in social scientific research

According to Wacquant (2007: 37), when commenting on Anthony Giddens’ work, reflexivity can have three referents: agency, society and science.

It can refer to the general ability of all individuals to reflect upon themselves in the world, upon their past thoughts and actions, upon their present views, options, practices, roles and emotions, upon their future plans and projects, upon their living conditions, contexts and relations, and upon society in general. In this context, reflexivity is understood as an instrument that enables social life; without it, subjects would not be competent social actors (Archer, 2003; Giddens, 2004).

It can also have institutions and social structures as a referent, in particular with regard to their norms, values, conducts and the effects of their actions. The mobilization of knowledge about social life is increasingly a constitutive part of societal organization, allowing different domains of social existence to be continually reviewed in light of that information. The expert systems that Giddens (1990, 1991) analyzed play a central role at this level. Reflexive modernization societies, knowledge societies, information societies and risk societies are examples of common designations that point, at least in part, not only to individual self-reflexivity, but also to the reflexive component of a given society’s institutions.

Reflexivity may also refer to the scientific practice. It is understood as an epistemological surveillance tool and a requirement of the scientific field. That is, science (via the scientists) is taken as an object in order to monitor its activities and thus to ensure the scientific validity of its practices. The present chapter is focused precisely on this dimension of reflexivity, even if the connections with the previous ones are multiple.

The appeal to the exercise of reflexivity in the scientific practice of social sciences has increased exponentially in the last 40 years. ¹ Although there are different perspectives on how reflexivity should be incorporated into the actions of social scientists, there is a broad agreement regarding its importance. Some authors even refer to a “reflexive turn” in social sciences (Mauthner and Doucet, 2003). This consensus anchors on the global acknowledgement that the social scientist is part of the analyzed object, which raises specific issues that are not encountered by other sciences. As Bourdieu (2004: 85) states, “social sciences are sciences like others, except that they encounter particular difficulty in being sciences like others” (see also Bourdieu et al., 1991). Social sciences exist in the object itself and constitute a social construction of a social construction. Due to the fact that producers of knowledge occupy a place in the studied reality, their arguments are cultural, social and historically grounded, which makes the scientific process of objectivation problematic.

The field of sociology has produced two of the calls with the greatest impact on the debate surrounding reflexivity’s role in the scientific practice of social sciences. Alvin Gouldner (1970), an American sociologist, and Pierre Bourdieu (1988, 2004, 2007; Bourdieu et al., 1991; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007), a French sociologist propose a reflexive sociology that explores the discipline in itself and views its researchers as an analytical object. Gouldner, criticizing the myth of a free-value sociology, argues that the knowledge sociologists have on themselves and on their positions in the social world allows them to better understand human practices. This reflexive return is therefore conceived as a requirement for the production of knowledge about social reality. We find a similar basis in Bourdieu’s argument, for which the sociologist’s self-analysis, as a cultural producer framed by specific socio-historical and scientific contexts, is a condition for “using the sociology of sociology in order to make a better sociology” (Bourdieu, 2004: 4). For both authors, scientific practice, as any social practice, is guided by social mechanisms that must be properly understood and monitored. In this process, reflexivity takes the role of epistemological surveillance tool facing epistemological obstacles that have, actually, a social nature. Sociologists must therefore incorporate a reflexive gaze upon themselves in their scientific habits and upon the discipline that allows, in Bourdieu’s (2004: 88) own words, objectivation of the objectifying subject, by identifying the social conditions of possibility of the knowledge produced.

Compared to Gouldner’s approach, Bourdieu’s perspective has the merit of focusing not only on the individual exercise of reflexivity by the social scientist, but also on the collective nature that the mobilization of reflexivity in social research should take. In this regard, he introduces the notion of a scientific field to account for the space of relations and objective positions that agents, teams and research centres occupy and simultaneously construct. The position in the field depends on the scientific capital, i.e. a type of symbolical capital based on knowledge and recognition. Agents, unequally endowed with this capital, face each other in order to keep or change the existing power relations. There is a homology between the structure of the scientific field and the cognitive structure of the scientists who are part of it, which means that their practices are framed by the rules and principles defined by the collective and incorporated by agents. Therefore, social scientists, in making their practices an object for reflection, should consider their position in the (scientific, disciplinary) field and understand how their interests and strategies are guided by the objective possibilities resulting from this positioning.

The calls for a reflexive sociology, undertaken by these two authors, are paradigmatic in that they stand as complete analytical programs of a meta-reflexivity of scientific knowledge production. However, since then, reflection on these issues has multiplied and unfolded in texts with diverse pronounced inclinations, ranging from epistemological (Maton, 2003; May and Perry, 2011), methodological (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000; Davies, 1999) ethical (Doucet and Mauthner, 2002; Tsekeris and Katrivesis, 2009), as well as in autobiographies of social scientists that direct an inquisitive gaze at their own personal and scientific trajectories (Berger, 1990; Cosslett et al., 2000; Glassner and Hertz, 2003; Stanley, 1992). The debate over the role of reflexivity in social research is particularly present in feminist approaches (Cosslett et al., 2000; Haraway, 1988; Stanley, 1992; Wasserfall, 1993) and in investigations that use ethnographic and qualitative methods (Adkins, 2009; Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000; Berger, 2015; Davies, 1999; Day, 2012; Denzin, 1996; Finlay, 2002; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003; Pillow, 2003).

Based on the already vast and consolidated meta-reflexive literature, we can say that the focus of reflexivity in social research, as an epistemological, methodological and ethical surveillance tool, is mainly directed at four different domains: external dimensions, scientific field, research process and research effects.

The external dimensions refer essentially to the impact that structural factors, exterior to the scientific field, such as the researchers’ social origins, social class, gender, race, sexual orientation, as well as their social trajectories, values and social adhesions can have on the production of knowledge (Berger, 2015; Bourdieu, 2004; Day, 2012; Finlay, 2002; Gouldner, 1970; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003; Wasserfall, 1993). These are key dimensions of human existence that shape the ways in which individuals see and interpret the world. Since researchers are part of the reality they observe, these social factors can impact the relationship they establish with the analytical object. At this level, reflexivity allows for the acknowledgement and the understanding of the social conditions that produce this relationship. The more aware researchers are of the effects that these factors have on the research, namely in procedures such as the choice of object and method, the better they can control and minimize them. ²

Reflexivity is also directed at the scientific field. Scientific production is inseparable from the position that the discipline has in the social sciences field, as well as the position that researchers occupy within this disciplinary field and in the narrower subfield of the institution where they develop their work (Bourdieu, 1988, 2004, 2007; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007; Gouldner, 1970; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003; Maton, 2003; May and Perry, 2011). Research is done from a specific location in the field, which has a structuring effect on the beliefs, dispositions and practices of its members, by establishing an objective field of “possibles” regarding analytical approaches. Researchers are defined in the field in relational terms, by proximity and distance towards other members, both from a purely scientific and intellectual point of view, and from a perspective that considers the competition for resources and power. Reflexivity plays the role of giving visibility and monitoring the not conscious nature of these dynamics that anchor the construction of the object (Haraway, 1988; Mauthner and Doucet, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Researching the Military
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Biography
• Introduction
• 1 Reflexivity and the sociological study of the military
• 2 What is worthy of study about the military?
• 3 Reflections on insider-outsider experiences of military research in South Africa
• 4 Bridging the gap between academic findings and operational military needs
• 5 Researching military geographies
• 6 Irregular anthropology
• 7 Interviewing the Brazilian military
• 8 The effects of military service on women's lives from the narrative perspective
• 9 Ethnography is a kind of flight
• 10 An ethnographic research in the military field
• 11 Immersion experiences within military organizations
• 12 The social scientist-soldier in action in the military field
• 13 An experience of ethnographic research with military families in the Brazilian Amazon border1
• 14 Women researching the military
• 15 Linked lives in military sociology
• Conclusion
• Index