Reflexivity and researching the military

Armed Forces and Society

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 219-233

  Higate, Paul ^a   Cameron, Ailsa ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

^b Local Research Ethics Committee   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Autoethnography; Military studies; Reflexivity; Subjectivity

Indexed keywords

EID: 29344472112     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X05278171     Document Type: Review

References (57)

1. For an interdisciplinary approach to masculinities in the military, see Paul R. Higate, ed., Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (New York: Greenwood/Praeger, 2003).
2. See Charles C. Moskos, John Allen Williams, and David R. Segal, eds., The Postmodern Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);
3. and Bradford Booth, Meyer Kestnbaum, and David R. Segal, "Are Post-Cold War Militaries Postmodern?" Armed Forces & Society 27, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 319-42.
4. Cynthia Hardy, Nelson Phillips, and Stewart Clegg, "Reflexivity in Organization and Management Theory: A Study of the Production of the Research 'Subject,'" Human Relations 54, no. 5 (2001): 534.
5. See Deborah Harrison, "Violence in the Military Community," in Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, ed. Paul R. Higate (New York: Greenwood/Praeger, 2003), 71 -90;
6. P. C. Salzman, "On Reflexivity," American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 805-13;
7. N. S. Mauthner and A. Doucet, "Reflexive Accounts of Reflexivity in Qualitative Data Analysis," Sociology 37, no. 3 (2003): 413-31;
8. and S. A. Speer, "What Can Conversation Analysis Contribute to Feminist Methodology? Putting Reflexivity into Practice," Discourse and Society 13, no. 6 (2002): 783-803.
9. R. Calori, "Real Time/Real Space Research: Connecting Action and Reflection in Organization Studies," Organization Studies 23, no. 6 (2002): 877-84.
10. Hardy, Phillips, and Clegg, "Reflexivity," 534.
11. As the former police officer Dick Hobbs, returning to study aspects of police work for his doctoral thesis, states, "The details of my biography are ... crucial in understanding not only my motivation for engaging in research, but also in comprehending the importance of selecting a relevant methodology that exploits the researcher's inevitable participation in the ensuing social milieu." See Dick Hobbs, Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3.
12. Lester R. Kurtz, "War and Peace on the Sociological Agenda," in Sociology and Its Publics, ed. Terence C. Halliday and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61-98. It was interesting to note that during negotiations with the Ministry of Defence, I was able to press home the case that a sociologist was likely to bring a different set of understandings to those of psychologists and psychology - the dominant discipline informing policy in the organization.
13. Caforio and Nuciari have pointed to the disproportionate number of male veterans involved in researching the military. See Giuseppe Caforio and Marina Nuciari, Handbook of the Sociology of the Military (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer).
14. Kurtz, "War and Peace," 64.
15. Examples are numerous. Recent commentaries in this journal could include C. Dandeker and D. Mason, "Diversifying the Uniform? The Participation of Minority Ethnic Personnel in the British Armed Services," Armed Forces & Society 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 481-507;
16. J. L. Pershing, "Gender Disparities in Enforcing the Honor Concept at the US Naval Academy," Armed Forces & Society 27, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 419-42;
17. and M. C. Harrell, "Army Officers' Spouses: Have the White Gloves Been Mothballed?" Armed Forces & Society 28, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 55-75.
18. Terence C. Halliday, "Sociology's Fragile Professionalism," in Sociology and Its Publics, ed. Terence C. Halliday and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3-43.
19. John Hockey, "Putting Down Smoke: Emotion and Engagement in Participant Observation," in Qualitative Research: The Emotional Dimension, ed. K. Carter and S. Delamont (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996), 24-43;
20. see also Paul Higate, "The Body Resists: Everyday Clerking and Unmilitary Practice," in The Body in Everyday Life, ed. S. Nettleton and J. Watson (London: Routledge, 1998), 180-99.
21. As Gerhard Kuemmel writes of military studies, "The reason for trans-/interdisciplinarity lies in the simple truth that the military is a highly complex social phenomenon in itself and one that cuts through various levels, touches several different contexts, and is thus subject to multiple processes of interpeneration"; Gerhard Kuemmel, "A Soldier Is a Soldier!? The Military and Its Soldiers in an Era of Globalization," in Handbook of the Sociology of the Military, ed. Giuseppe Caforio and Marina Nuciari (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer), 3.
22. Social scientists involved in work for the military rarely reflect on their experiences within the terms outlined by Cynthia Enloe around the concepts of militarism and militarization. Enloe sees the former concept, militarism, as an ideology encompassing a cluster of values and beliefs characterized by a cynical view of humankind. See Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23-24.
23. A recent cross-national survey suggests that 76 percent of research on the military is carried out by men; Caforio and Nuciari, Handbook, 29. It is our observation that the women producing the more radical commentary on the military tend to be less formally involved with the organization. This may partly account for the survey's considerable gender bias as feminist commentators are perhaps less likely to self-identify as "military sociologists." In addition, there may be something of a mutual mistrust with regard to the military's orientation toward social scientists and vice versa. One survey participant states, "[There exists] a more or less explicit and more or less widespread mood of 'suspicion' and 'reticence' of military institution toward sociology and social scientists in generally"; Caforio and Nuciari, Handbook, 65.
24. However, it is likely that research on such issues as Gulf War syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder might be seen as worthy areas of study that demand less rationale than research that sets out explicitly to improve the military's performance or efficiency, for example.
25. See J. Acker, K. Barry, and J. Essfeld, "Objectivity and Truth, Problems in Doing Feminist Research," in Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, ed. M. Fonow and J. Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991);
26. Diane Bell, Pat Caplan, and Wazir Karim, eds., Gendered Fields: Women, Men and Ethnography (London: Routledge, 1993);
27. Sandra Harding, Feminism and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and Open University, 1987);
28. Anne Oakley, "Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms," in Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Robert (London: Routledge, 1981);
29. and S. Scott, "The Personable and the Powerful: Gender and Status in Sociological Research," in Social Researching, Politics, Problems, Practice, ed. C. Bell and H. Roberts (London: Routledge, 1984).
30. Although Hockey's status as veteran provided him with an insight into the subject of his doctoral research (the socialization of infantry recruits), he chose, at times, to ask "naïve" questions rather than those drawing on a stock of assumed knowledge. In this way, he was able to influence the nature of participant response together with deriving some sense of the accuracy and appropriateness of responses from participants aimed at a presumed outsider. The insider/outsider categories are potentially complex and could include those who have grown up as military "brats," current and former military spouses, or active-duty or reserve military officers affiliated to a range of military and nonmilitary institutions.
31. Caforio and Nuciari, Handbook, 29.
32. I. L. Horowitz, ed., Sociological Self Images: A Collective Portrait (Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1970);
33. and Brian Roberts, ed., Biographical Research (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2002).
34. Liz Stanley, The Auto/BiographicalI(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992);
35. and Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology (London: Routledge, 1993).
36. John Hockey, "Putting Down Smoke: Emotion and Engagement in Participant Observation,' in Qualitative Research: The Emotional Dimension, ed. K. Carter and S. Delamont (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996), 23-42;
37. Paul Higate, "The Body Resists: Everyday Clerking and Unmilitary Practice," in The Body in Everyday Life, ed. Sarah Nettleton and Jonathon Watson (London: Routledge, 1998);
38. Paul Higate, "Soft Clerks and Hard Civvies: Pluralising Military Masculinities," in Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, ed. P. R. Higate (New York: Greenwood/Praeger, 2003);
39. and D. H. J. Morgan, '"It Will Make a Man of You': Notes on National Service, Masculinity and Autobiography," Studies in Sexual Politics 17, no. 1 (1987): 35.
40. See, for example, L. Tillman-Healy, "A Secret Life in a Culture of Thinness: Reflections on Body, Food and Bulimia," in Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing, ed. C. Ellis and A. Bochner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 76-108.
41. D. Morgan, Discovering Men (London: Routledge, 1987).
42. Morgan, "It Will Make a Man of You," 5.
43. J. Ribbens, "Fact or Fiction? Aspects of the Use of Autobiographical Writing in Undergraduate Sociology," Sociology 1, no. 27 (1993): 88.
44. Replication of the reflexive work presented here could be of particular interest in an internationally comparative context.
45. See Paul Higate and Ailsa Cameron, "Military Partners Reflections on the Traditional Military," Journal of Political and Military Sociology 32, no. 2 (2004): 207-218, on particular aspects of the findings generated from this project.
46. A female graduate student being supervised by one of the authors recently returned from fieldwork with the British armed services expressing considerable surprise that the service personnel she encountered were "real and normal people." This statement was of note because previously she had not considered the military as a valid sphere of research and had tacitly cast military personnel as "different" from civilians.
47. Roger Graef, Talking Blues: The Police in Their Own Words (London: Fontana, 1990).32. Securing access to military participants for research purposes continues to be a significant challenge for many interested in researching the organization. See findings of the Internet study conducted by
48. Giuseppe Caforio and Marina Nuciari, "Social Research and the Military," in Handbook of the Sociology of the Military, ed. G. Caforio and M. Nuciari (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer, 2003).
49. Hockey, "Putting Down Smoke," 32.
50. During doctoral fieldwork involving interviews with homeless veterans, I came across similar sentiments in respect of participants who experienced a powerful sense of freedom upon discharge from the British army. A number of them "took to the road" and traveled extensively throughout the United Kingdom. In these terms, they reacted against earlier experiences of being considered as a "name and a number" while living a life largely directed by others. See Paul Higate, "Ex-Servicemen on the Road: Travel and Homelessness," The Sociological Review 48, no. 3 (2000): 331-48.
51. Within the context of his doctoral work exploring the ways in which infantry recruits are socialized, the ex-soldier Hockey states, "I wanted to recover [my] past, to understand it.... [A]bove all I wanted to find out what they [my military superiors] had done to me! I wanted to find out how they had done it and what the consequences were. I wanted to dissect military life, bit by bit, with conceptual tools.... I wanted to demythologize it, and by so doing I wanted to take away their power over me once and for all"; Hockey, "Putting Down Smoke," 38.
52. Hockey, "Putting Down Smoke," Ibid., 27.
53. Bell, Caplan, and Karim, Gendered Fields;
54. and A. Coffey, The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity (London: Sage, 1999).
55. The concept of the habitus is useful here in illuminating the ways in which human actors may carry deeply socialized elements of experience (fostered in the military, for example) beyond the immediate sphere in which they proved functional. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions (London: Routledge, 1986);
56. and Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
57. Anecdotal experience suggests that there tends to be a lack of general awareness of the different routes to acquiring the title of "Dr.," with the medical pathway dominating understanding.