This paper analyses how the preferred self-conceptions of men in an elite military unit — the British Parachute Regiment — were disciplined by the organizationally based discursive resources on which ...they drew. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, we argue that preferred self-conceptions (i.e. desired identities) are mechanisms for disciplining employees' identity work, and analyse how paratroopers were subject to, and constituted by, the discursive practices of the Regiment. Paratroopers' preferred conceptions of their selves were disciplined by understandings both of what it meant to be a paratrooper and of the institutional processes by which they were made. In talking about how the Regiment `manufactured' them, paratroopers provided insight on how the Regiment produced and reproduced the idealized identities to which they aspired. Second, to complement other understandings of identities, we suggest that people are often best characterized as `aspirants'. An aspirational identity is a story-type or template in which an individual construes him- or herself as one who is earnestly desirous of being a particular kind of person and self-consciously and consistently in pursuit of this objective. The recognition of subjectively construed identities as narrativized permits an appreciation of individuals as sophisticatedly agentic, while recognizing that their `choices' are made within frameworks of disciplinary power which both enable and restrict their scope for discursive manoeuvre.
The article analyzes some signs of the objective side of disobedience, namely the method of committing a crime, its consequences, as well as qualifying and especially qualifying signs. It is proved ...that the principle of unity of command of commanders permeates all spheres of military activity, allows the military organization of the state to ensure the defense capability of Ukraine. Disobedience is the crime that destroys military-service relations between the commander (chief) and subordinate, directly affects the combat effectiveness of a military unit and, therefore, has an increased degree of public danger. In the scientific literature there are views proving the increased public danger of an open refusal to comply with the order of the commander (chief), motivating this thesis that a soldier shows a greater degree of determination to violate his duties, a greater willpower, which has already passed a period of hesitation. According to the author, an open and public refusal to comply with the order of the chief is more socially dangerous than cases of other intentional failure to comply with the order. Disobedience not only threatens the combat effectiveness of a military unit, but also significantly affects the state of military law and order and discipline. We believe that the court in all cases of criminal proceedings on the fact of disobedience or other intentional non-execution of the order, pointing out the grave consequences, should reason its point of view. It is concluded that the disposition of Article 402 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine requires some improvements that are relevant to modern times. These improvements will help strengthen military discipline and the rule of law. Submitted suggestions by «delega ferende» that will correct significant legislative errors
This article discusses some key aspects of the military technical culture on the basis of theoretical considerations and on the basis of preliminary research based on the questionnaire, with topics ...specific to the technical systems management issues. Although specialized literature does not provide enough theoretical evidence to investigate the problem, the setting of characteristics and components based on the military organization’s specificity in terms of the theory of capabilities is actually achieved as a national contribution. These aspects are analyzed in the wider framework of modern military managerial practice, while outlining the contribution of a robust level of the technical culture to the achievement of managerial performance.
The paper identifies and analyse some features of qualitative social studies that, in the context of the military organization, could create difficulties in data collection process and could have a ...negative impact on the validity and reliability of the results. There are presented the main aspects of qualitative research and methodology, and highlighted how the main characteristics of the military organization could influence the conduct of this type of scientific research.
Master Resilience Training in the U.S. Army Reivich, Karen J; Seligman, Martin E. P; McBride, Sharon
The American psychologist,
01/2011, Volume:
66, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The U.S. Army Master Resilience Trainer (MRT) course, which provides face-to-face resilience training, is one of the foundational pillars of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. The 10-day MRT ...course is the foundation for training resilience skills to sergeants and for teaching sergeants how to teach these skills to their soldiers. The curriculum is based on materials developed by the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Resilience Program (PRP), and other empirically validated work in the field of positive psychology. This "train the trainer model" is the main vehicle for the dissemination of MRT concepts to the entire force.
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The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought returned focus to civil–military relations in complex, fluid, and “asymmetric” environments. The close integration of politics and violence has led to ...renewed calls for more careful civilian control and involvement in strategy-making and operational design. While scholars and practitioners have struggled with this pressing task, so have the insurgent organizations that the United States and others have been fighting against. And, in some ways, rebels have been more successful in harmonizing military and political efforts. Yet, there is little research into the form and implications of their civil–military balance. This article constructs a typology of rebel civil–military relations that maps the overlap of an intensive form of civilian control, political integration, and the degree of military professionalization. The typology is developed by categorizing a range of prominent organizations operative in contemporary and past civil wars and considering how these patterns might influence insurgents’ pursuit of intricately intertwined political and military goals. This theory development exercise—intended for hypothesis generation to inform future avenues of research—has implications for how we understand insurgency and state-based civil–military relations in unstable environments.
Drawing on survey data from 1,746 enlistees in the Republic of Korea military, this paper examines the moderating effect of age on the impact that the leadership of superiors have on their ...subordinates’ public service motivation (PSM). Our analysis shows that transformational leadership and transactional leadership both have a positive statistical correlation with PSM. Furthermore, the relationship between transformational leadership and PSM is negatively moderated by age. This means that the higher the age, the smaller the positive influence of transformational leadership becomes on PSM. Based on our analysis, to cultivate public service motivation within a military organization, we make policy recommendations for building and practicing an integrated form of leadership that combines the advantages of the transformational and transactional methods, and in terms of discovering and applying forms of leadership in pursuit of the public good and social responsibility as organizational goals.
Quality of information is crucial for decision-makers to judge the battlefield situations and design the best operation plans, however, real intelligence data are often incomplete and noisy, where ...missing links prediction methods and spurious links identification algorithms can be applied, if modeling the complex military organization as the complex network where nodes represent functional units and edges denote communication links. Traditional link prediction methods usually work well on homogeneous networks, but few for the heterogeneous ones. And the military network is a typical heterogeneous network, where there are different types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we proposed a combined link prediction index considering both the nodes’ types effects and nodes’ structural similarities, and demonstrated that it is remarkably superior to all the 25 existing similarity-based methods both in predicting missing links and identifying spurious links in a real military network data; we also investigated the algorithms’ robustness under noisy environment, and found the mistaken information is more misleading than incomplete information in military areas, which is different from that in recommendation systems, and our method maintained the best performance under the condition of small noise. Since the real military network intelligence must be carefully checked at first due to its significance, and link prediction methods are just adopted to purify the network with the left latent noise, the method proposed here is applicable in real situations. In the end, as the FINC-E model, here used to describe the complex military organizations, is also suitable to many other social organizations, such as criminal networks, business organizations, etc., thus our method has its prospects in these areas for many tasks, like detecting the underground relationships between terrorists, predicting the potential business markets for decision-makers, and so on.
•For the first time, we quantify the nodes’ types effect on their linking behaviors, and empirically proved that it could remarkably improve the prediction accuracy of 25 current methods.•We design a new link prediction index for heterogeneous military network and it is superior to all the other methods both in missing links prediction and spurious links identification tasks.•We investigate the algorithms’ robustness under noisy environment, and demonstrate that our method maintains the best performance under the condition of small noise.
How rulers organize and use their security forces is thought to have important implications for regime survival, repression, and military effectiveness. While a number of studies provide insight into ...the coercive institutions of individual states, efforts to understand systematic patterns have been hampered by a lack of reliable data on state security forces that can be compared across states and within them over time. This article presents the State Security Forces (SSF) dataset, which includes 375 security forces in 110 countries, 1960–2010. It tracks how each force is commanded, staffed, equipped, and deployed, as well as the number of security forces and potential counterweights in each state’s security sector as a whole. After illustrating how the SSF dataset differs from related ones and presenting descriptive trends, the article shows how it can be used to deepen our understanding of coup-proofing and strategic substitution, and identifies additional research uses of the dataset.
Systemic violence against women in the military has existed for decades, but they have mostly refrained from public resistance. However, in the context of the #MeToo movement in Sweden, 1768 women ...published a call for an end to violence and sexual harassment in the military. We analyse this call as a public resistance effort against the military and find that #MeToo is: (i) challenging the norms of the hyper‐masculine military organization, making resistance towards it visible; and (ii) resisting the practices of sexual harassment and lack of responsibility in the military organization. The military organization is questioned when it comes to norms and practices, but there are variations in whether the social order of the military is truly challenged. Still, the call highlights the fragmentation of this ‘last bastion of masculinity’. More research is needed on the erosion of the militarized norms and practices and the effects of the call.
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