1st Edition
Understanding the Impact of Social Research on the Military Reflections and Critiques
This book seeks to chart and evaluate the impact of social research on the military itself.
By "impact", the authors in this volume simply mean that which has a marked effect or influence on changing military policy, practices, knowledge, skills, behaviour, or living conditions. The book comprises a series of reflective contributions from scholars who have conducted research on the military as external scholars with no formal ties to the armed forces, as "native" researchers formally linked to them, as well as various kinds of contracted social scientists enabled by the military to carry out their investigations. The authors were asked to make the question of the impact of social scientific research on the armed forces an object of study in itself and to situate their reflections in terms of wider analytical questions. As a result, the chapters can be divided, broadly speaking, into two types of orientation: some are centered on theoretical and analytical issues, while others focus on the researchers’ lived experiences.
This book will be of interest to students of military studies, sociology, organisational studies, psychology and political science.
Introduction
Eyal Ben-Ari, Helena Carreiras and Celso Castro
1. Truth in Military Studies: Lessons for Producers and Consumers of Research on the Military
David R. Segal
2. Military sociology in Germany: The Roles and Challenges of In-house Institutes
Martin Elbe and Gerhard Kuemmel
3. What does Social Science Research on the Military "Do"? Between Academic Ornament and Dubious Ally of the Israeli Military
Eyal Ben-Ari
4. Bridging two worlds: the knowledge-policy linkage in the study of the Portuguese Armed Forces
Helena Carreiras
5. Between Academia and the Military profession: a case study of Finnish National Defence University
Soili Paananen
6. Research as a Totem: How an Academic Book became the Patrimony of a Generation of Officers
Celso Castro
7. Notes on the Appropriation of an Ethnography: The Case of the Military Police of the State of São Paulo
Piero de Camargo Leirner
8. Possibilities of impact and acceptance of research and public policies with a gender perspective in the Argentine Armed Forces
Laura Masson
Biography
Eyal Ben-Ari is a research fellow at the Institute for Society, Security and Peace, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel.
Helena Carreiras is director of the National Defense Institute, Portugal, and Associate Professor, University Institute of Lisbon.
Celso Castro is full professor and dean of the School of Social Sciences, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil.
