Theoretical Framework of the Research

While a considerable amount of theoretical literature has explored core values and characteristics of the U.S. Armed Forces, limited empirical research has examined veterans’ accounts of military culture. To elucidate military culture and help inform ongoing efforts to incorporate military culture into the provision of healthcare services for veterans, seven focus groups (n = 44) were conducted with diverse groups of veterans to provide their first-hand accounts on these topics. Content analysis of their responses yielded four broad clusters: (1) descriptions of military culture and values (e.g., patriotism, camaraderie, discipline), (2) conflict with values during military service (e.g., betrayed by politicians/bureaucracy, internal conflict of killing), (3) cultural changes post-military service (e.g., continuity of military values/culture, disparate from civilian culture, interpersonal difficulties), and (4) communication with non-military connected persons (e.g., I do not talk about military experiences, I only talk with other veterans). The results expand upon prior conceptualizations of military culture and provide preliminary implications for integrating military culture into healthcare service provisions for veterans. Furthermore, this study highlights the need for further empirical research on the internalization and longer-term impact of military culture to better address the needs of those who served in the U.S. Armed Forces.

: This project reviews key concepts of organizational culture and examines how our military culture may change as a result of various social and environmental influences. Military culture has always had a significant impact on operational effectiveness. But even military culture has a context and can be acted upon by other forces. Changes in our society will produce changes and strains inside the military, which could force new learning and adaptation of its culture. For the Army's culture, change may pose dangers. On one hand, the Army's culture may evolve too far, causing the force to become civilianized and less ready for the demands of combat. On the other hand, an Army focused on its own norms and values could lose sight of the values of the society it is sworn to defend. This study examined the military's organizational culture through the use of an organizational culture/climate survey that measured and compared the attitudes and perceptions of Army officers toward a wide range of culture-related issues. The results of the survey provided insights as to the need for change in our military culture due to internal and external influences. The study concludes by outlining implications for the Army.

Reviewed by: Military Culture in Imperial China Garret Olberding (bio) Nicola di Cosmo, editor. Military Culture in Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. vii, 445 pp. Hardcover $46.50, ISBN 978-0-674-03109-8. In current scholarly circles, the perceived influence of premodern military culture is often eclipsed by the manifold contributions of contemporary literati, those who composed the civilian corps of bureaucrats and court advisors. In comprehensive assessments of Chinese cultural history, military culture has sometimes been given such short shrift that one might conclude that issues of warfare were almost irrelevant. Di Cosmo’s masterful compilation of essays will go far in rectifying any such impressions, for it reveals, among other things, the indelible coloration of militaristic sensibilities in court culture, a keen understanding among civil administrators of the complex problems involved in military administration, and an enduring commitment to the intermingling of literate and military cultures within various strata of society. As di Cosmo explains in his introduction, the concept of culture can incorporate numerous irregularly overlapping social features, from the pragmatic to the theoretical, the concrete to the strategic. Di Cosmo explicitly acknowledges several: systems of conduct and behavior, strategic decision making, a set of values determining a society’s propensity for warfare and the organization of its military, and the aspects of aesthetic and literary traditions that valorize military events (pp. 3–4). Correspondingly, the essays range widely in topic and period. Some, such as Michael Loewe’s, Robin D. S. Yates’s, Jonathan Karam Skaff’s, Yingcong Dai’s, and Peter Perdue’s, detail carefully the composition and structure of armies, the laws that govern them, the economics that sustained them, and the external influences bearing on their evolution. Others engage with historiographical representation, whether of military battles and campaigns, of important figures, or of the personal records of war, such as the essays by the late Edward Dreyer, Rafe de Crespigny, David Graff, Don Wyatt, and Grace Fong. And still others by Ralph Sawyer, Kathleen Ryor, S. R. Gilbert, and Joanna Waley-Cohen address more intellectual issues, such as the interpretation and use of literary texts in the education of military men, the increased militarization of an era’s total culture, or the recondite application of theoretical notions to the pursuit of war. In sum, there is something for scholars and educated readers of almost every stripe. One hopes that the topics addressed will broaden perspectives and the conceptualization of the structure and influence of the military in premodern China. In the remainder of this review, I raise several perspectives introduced by the essays that, while by no means comprehensive of what the volume provides, should allow readers a sense of its distinction. Instead of depicting briefly each contribution, I will instead more extensively limn a single essay illustrative of each topic represented above. My selection is not tied to any evaluative metric but to what the pieces of each of my constructed groupings can highlight of the volume’s merits. I recommend that [End Page 430] interested readers use these representative synopses only as an incomplete guide; each piece presents matters of consequence and general interest. Heading the collection is Robin Yates’s engrossing essay on the imposition of religious ritual norms in military codes, and, just as significantly, the profound influence of early military codes on civilian organization and conduct, even in much later eras (p. 23). Indeed, the fusion of legal and military culture in early China was so close that, “in the view of Han intellectuals, criminal law originated in military law. . . . There was, practically speaking, no distinction between warfare and punishment (bing and xing)” (p. 25). This fusion meant both that military norms were deeply embedded even in civilian law and, conversely, that civil bureaucrats were the masters, at least in law, of military power. Because of the demands enforced by penal and administrative codes, “soldiers were obliged to achieve a minimal degree of literacy,” primarily for daily recordkeeping, but also for keeping cognizant of the prohibitions that could lead to certain punishment, or even death (p. 40). However, the laws pertaining to military life were not merely punitive. Success in military ventures could have...

In this research the starting point was that a certain gap between military and civilian culture could exist, because of the inevitable difference between typical military values and new values arisen in contemporary societies, with special reference to Western affluent societies. It seems that this hypothesis belong to the culture-free side, since it rests on the concept of a military culture made of specific values, which are the same in every society. There is anyway a different viewpoint, following the trends of studies developed in the intercultural relations domain, mainly dealing with business internationalisation and cross-cultural management topics, generally known as the culture-bound thesis. In the culture-free assumption the consequence should be a pressure of social change on a supposed unique military; in the culture-bound conception a mutual and systemic adaptation of different institutions within each inclusive society driven by one's own culture could be expected. Findings in this research show that if a relative gap can be observed between military and civilian students, this varies greatly according to different groups of countries. Distances seem to be larger in countries belonging to the post-modern cluster (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands), and lowering down in modern countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria and Poland, and even less appreciable in Romania, South Africa and Turkey. This could give some support to the culture-free thesis, according to which military culture is specific and find more convergences with so-called traditional societies than with modern or post-modern cultures. But results are not as sharp as needed, and the culture-bound thesis cannot anyway be rejected.

We provide a discussion of three of Zimmerman's (2001) conjectures about, and prescriptions for improving, the current unsatisfactory state of empirical management accounting research: its focus on describing practice instead of testing theories; its focus on decision-making instead of control; and reliance on social sciences other than economics. We suggest that these conjectures are based on inaccurate descriptions of current empirical management accounting research and the prescriptions offer potentially misleading guidance for future research. In contrast to Zimmerman (2001), we believe that the current research is guided by theory from a variety of social sciences (primarily economics, psychology and sociology) and that this diversity is appropriate for the applied field of management accounting. We argue that while economics provides a good basis for much empirical research in management accounting, other social sciences offer more potential to explain important features of management accounting such as understanding people's preferences, how they think, how they interact with other people and the process of change. Our conclusion is that empirical management accounting research will be better off if it appeals less to disciplinary identity and instead uses a variety of theoretical frameworks from the social sciences to provide more complete explanations of management accounting practice.

Military Culture

کلیشه‌های جنسیتی را می‌توان یکی از مفاهیم برجسته در حوزه‌ی جامعه‌شناسی زبان به‌شمار آورد. این کلیشه‌ها در همه‌ی سطوح زبانی از جمله در ادبیات کودک یافت می‌شوند و در بازتولید زبان جنسیت-زده و گفتمان مردسالار نقش به‌سزایی دارند. پژوهش حاضر به بررسی این کلیشه‌ها در مجموع چهل داستان کودک در گروه سنی «الف» و «ب» پرداخته و درصدد این بوده تا با روشی توصیفی-تحلیلی در چارچوب زبان‌شناسی فرهنگی میزان و نوع کلیشه‌های رایج در دو گروه را با یک‌دیگر مقایسه کند و در ادامه تفسیری زبانی و فرهنگی از این کلیشه‌ها ارائه دهد. یافته‌های پژوهش نشان‌گر این بوده‌اند که اگرچه نسبت به آثاری تألیفی در دهه‌های پیشین از میزان کلیشه‌های جنسیتی در داستان‌های کودکان کاسته شده لیکن گفتمان مردسالار در سطح ژرف‌ساخت داستان‌های کودکان هم‌چنان حضور پررنگی داشته و ارزش‌ها و ملاک‌های مربوطه را از طریق ارائه‌ی چارچوب‌ها و نقش‌های جنسیت‌زده در زبان رمزگذاری کرده و به مخاطب القا می‌کند.

This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build its cultural capacity over the previous decade. It goes on to highlight three modalities represented across the volume’s chapters for addressing the question of military cultural awareness: the institutionalization of military cultural education and training, and of cultural heritage management and protection, but also assessments of prevailing models and lessons learned in the pursuit of this capacity. The introduction also identifies different perspectives represented in this volume with respect to these developments. As discussed across the chapters, it gives particular attention to the challenges for expertise and the several conceptions of culture as a dimension of: military culture, culture training, counterinsurgency, humanitarian cooperation, and technology-driven problem-solving respectively.KeywordsCultural HeritageCultural KnowledgeCultural AwarenessCultural PolicyMarine CorpsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Culture and Complexity

School counselors must be knowledgeable about military culture in order to help military students and their families in a culturally competent manner. This article explores the nature of this unique culture, which is often unfamiliar to educators, including its language, hierarchy, sense of rules and regulations, self-expectations and self-sacrifice. Specific suggestions, such as professional development, self-examination and cultural immersion experiences, are provided so that professional school counselors can increase their multicultural competence when working with this population. Finally, a case study illustrates the challenges associated with this culture and implications for school counselors in regard to increasing cultural competence when working with military families are discussed.Keywords: military, school counselors, families, culture, cultural competenceThe professional school counselor is called to be a culturally competent practitioner (Holcomb-McCoy & Chen-Hayes, 2011). The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) position statement on cultural diversity emphasizes that school counselors should work for the success of all students from all cultures (ASCA, 2009). Overall, school counselors should work to develop their self-awareness, knowledge and skills when it comes to working with students from diverse cultures (Remley & Herlihy, 2014).While other cultures have been explored in-depth in the professional school counseling literature (Bradley, Johnson, Rawls, & Dodson-Sims, 2005; Byrd & Hays, 2012; Smith-Adcock, Daniels, Lee, Villalba, & Indelicato, 2006; Yeh, 2001), military culture has not. Military culture is often unfamiliar to educators (Atuel, Esqueda, & Jacobson, 2011) who encounter military students and their families regularly. Every school district in the United States has a child who is in some way connected with the military, and 80% of all military children attend public schools (Military Child Education Coalition, 2014). Therefore, it is essential for school counselors to be knowledgeable in navigating military culture in order to support military students and their family members in their schools (Luby, 2012; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2014).Overall, military culture is a unique one (Luby, 2012) that presents distinctive challenges for its service members and their family members (Brown & Lettieri, 2008; Gooddale, Abb, & Moyer, 2012). While the military itself can be viewed as a profession, the military extends into the service members' personal realms as well, affecting everyday lifestyle as well as the lifestyle of family members (Cozza & Lemer, 2013).Visible and Invisible Aspects of CultureWhile strategies for working with military children and their families during deployments have been investigated in the professional literature (Allen & Staley, 2007; Cole, 2012; Robertson, 2007), this article explores military culture in order to help increase the school counselor's knowledge and awareness. McAuliffe (2013), citing the metaphor of an iceberg, encouraged counselors to explore both the visible (above water) and invisible (below water) aspects of culture. Culture that is most easily observed by outsiders, like the tip of an iceberg above water, is considered surface culture (McAuliffe, 2013). Culture which is not observed by outsiders, like the larger part of the iceberg under the water, is considered either shallow culture or deep culture (McAuliffe, 2013). Shallow and deep culture correspond to more intense emotional experiences that may require extensive counseling services and support from the school counselor (The Iceberg Concept of Culture, n.d.; McAuliffe, 2013).The present author seeks to inform the school counselor about the nature of surface, shallow and deep cultural aspects of the military and provide implications for school counselor practice. In order to fully describe the nature of military culture and its meaning for military students and their family members, this article begins with an exploration of the surface-level aspects of military culture (language, hierarchy, sense of rules and regulations) and then progressively explores the more emotionally intense shallow and deep aspects of military culture (self-expectations and self-sacrifice). …

Background and aims: Intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention ultimately hinges on change at the level of the household where relationships are conducted. There is little research examining the process of relational change among couples with a history of IPV following exposure to a community level IPV prevention intervention, particularly in low-income settings. This thesis aims to fill this gap by examining how relational change occurred (or did not) among couples in Uganda exposed to SASA!, a community mobilization intervention aimed to prevent IPV and HIV. The study first explores relationship change processes among couples exposed to the intervention. Secondly, it examines the key aspects of the intervention and social network factors that influenced these changes, illuminating the pathways through which the intervention diffused. Methods: This thesis comprises: i) a methodological examination of qualitative dyadic (couple) data collection and analysis; ii) a qualitative study of couples exposed to the SASA! intervention using in-depth interviews to examine processes of relationship change; iii) a mixed methods analysis of the influence of intervention and social network factors in the diffusion of new ideas and behaviour around intimate relationships and IPV. Findings & Conclusions: Through examining relationship trajectories from both partner’s perspectives the sphere in which IPV occurs comes through clearly, revealing the common challenges couples faced, how they were shaped by gender roles and, also, how they were able to change, preventing IPV. Change is possible through key community-level interventions working with both men and women that generate hope and belief in an alternative way of achieving fulfilling relationships and family life. This includes providing simple tools to improve relationships and local change agents to support change, all within the context of a wider community that is changing together, generating new norms in the process. Thus, the IPV prevention field may benefit from the inclusion of relationship education/skills and support for both men and women at the community level.

There is a set of statistical measures developed mostly in corpus and computational linguistics and information retrieval, known as keyness measures, which are generally expected to detect textual features that account for differences between two texts or groups of texts. These measures are based on the frequency, distribution, or dispersion of words (or other features). Searching for relevant differences or similarities between two text groups is also an activity that is characteristic of traditional literary studies, whenever two authors, two periods in the work of one author, two historical periods or two literary genres are to be compared. Therefore, applying quantitative procedures in order to search for differences seems to be promising in the field of computational literary studies as it allows to analyze large corpora and to base historical hypotheses on differences between authors, genres and periods on larger empirical evidence. However, applying quantitative procedures in order to answer questions relevant to literary studies in many cases raises methodological problems, which have been discussed on a more general level in the context of integrating or triangulating quantitative and qualitative methods in mixed methods research of the social sciences. This paper aims to solve these methodological issues concretely for the concept of distinctiveness and thus to lay the methodological foundation permitting to operationalize quantitative procedures in order to use them not only as rough exploratory tools, but in a hermeneutically meaningful way for research in literary studies. Based on a structural definition of potential candidate measures for analyzing distinctiveness in the first section, we offer a systematic description of the issue of integrating quantitative procedures into a hermeneutically meaningful understanding of distinctiveness by distinguishing its epistemological from the methodological perspective. The second section develops a systematic strategy to solve the methodological side of this issue based on a critical reconstruction of the widespread non-integrative strategy in research on keyness measures that can be traced back to Rudolf Carnap’s model of explication. We demonstrate that it is, in the first instance, mandatory to gain a comprehensive qualitative understanding of the actual task. We show that Carnap’s model of explication suffers from a shortcoming that consists in ignoring the need for a systematic comparison of what he calls the explicatum and the explicandum. Only if there is a method of systematic comparison, the next task, namely that of evaluation can be addressed, which verifies whether the output of a quantitative procedure corresponds to the qualitative expectation that must be clarified in advance. We claim that evaluation is necessary for integrating quantitative procedures to a qualitative understanding of distinctiveness. Our reconstruction shows that both steps are usually skipped in empirical research on keyness measures that are the most important point of reference for the development of a measure of distinctiveness. Evaluation, which in turn requires thorough explication and conceptual clarification, needs to be employed to verify this relation. In the third section we offer a qualitative clarification of the concept of distinctiveness by spanning a three-dimensional conceptual space. This flexible framework takes into account that there is no single and proper concept of distinctiveness but rather a field of possible meanings depending on research interest, theoretical framework, and access to the perceptibility or salience of textual features. Therefore, we shall, instead of stipulating any narrow and strict definition, take into account that each of these aspects – interest, theoretical framework, and access to perceptibility – represents one dimension of the heuristic space of possible uses of the concept of distinctiveness. The fourth section discusses two possible strategies of operationalization and evaluation that we consider to be complementary to the previously provided clarification, and that complete the task of establishing a candidate measure successfully as a measure of distinctiveness in a qualitatively ambitious sense. We demonstrate that two different general strategies are worth considering, depending on the respective notion of distinctiveness and the interest as elaborated in the third section. If the interest is merely taxonomic, classification tasks based on multi-class supervised machine learning are sufficient. If the interest is aesthetic, more complex and intricate evaluation strategies are required, which have to rely on a thorough conceptual clarification of the concept of distinctiveness, in particular on the idea of salience or perceptibility. The challenge here is to correlate perceivable complex features of texts such as plot, theme (aboutness), style, form, or roles and constellation of fictional characters with the unperceived frequency and distribution of word features that are calculated by candidate measures of distinctiveness. Existing research did not clarify, so far, how to correlate such complex features with individual word features. The paper concludes with a general reflection on the possibility of mixed methods research for computational literary studies in terms of explanatory power and exploratory use. As our strategy of combining explication and evaluation shows, integration should be understood as a strategy of combining two different perspectives on the object area: in our evaluation scenarios, that of empirical reader response and that of a specific quantitative procedure. This does not imply that measures of distinctiveness, which proved to reach explanatory power in one qualitative aspect, should be supposed to be successful in all fields of research. As long as evaluation is omitted, candidate measures of distinctiveness lack explanatory power and are limited to exploratory use. In contrast with a skepticism that has sometimes been expressed from literary scholars with regard to the relevance of computational literary studies on proper issues of the humanities, we believe that integrating computational methods into hermeneutic literary studies can be achieved in a way that reaches higher explanatory power than the usual exploratory use of keyness measures, but it can only be achieved individually for concrete tasks and not once and for all based on a general theoretical demonstration.

This article raises the question of how the Canadian educational system can avoid the polemics of massive immigration from non-European countries and strive towards developing an equitable, fair and sustainable society based on socially just, cohesive principles. The discussion revolves around the concepts of culture and identity in a pluralistic society and how the educational system responds to these challenges. The focus is on understanding the multiple identities of Canadian students, including aboriginal epistemologies, by creating culturally responsive teachers, developing intercultural competence programmes and establishing the foundations of multicultural education. This multi-thematic study explores ways in which contemporary ways of teaching and learning can be transformed into a diverse, sustainable and global curriculum which is inclusive of all students, regardless of their multiple identities.

Purpose Theoretical assumptions for explaining travel behaviour changes are frequently limited to disciplinary boundaries. By combining the occurrence of key events with attitudinal dimensions in the ROA model and, furthermore, drawing on the model of cognitive dissonance, an integrated theoretical framework is presented. Methodology/approach We review several streams of research in different fields of travel behaviour research and develop a theoretical framework for guiding future empirical work on travel behaviour research. Findings The theoretical framework proposes that due to a key event a window of opportunity opens for behavioural change and adaptation processes of attitudes and behaviour. Research limitations/implications Further empirical research will have to show the validity and usefulness of the theoretical framework developed. A panel data analysis is proposed with attitudinal variables before and after a certain key event.

While urbanization has been closely related to economic development and demographic change, heterogeneous patterns and processes of regional growth and change reflect the uneven distribution of urbanization, the subtle impact of demographic dynamics and the consequent implications for land resource management and environmental sustainability. Differences in patterns of urban growth and change in a paradigmatic region such as the Mediterranean basin—often masked by statistics indicating a net increase in urban population—reflect regional divides in socio-demographic, economic and environmental variables. To better understand the impacts of these regional differences, interdisciplinary research should better link socio-demographic and economic patterns from the one side—and environmental dynamics from the other side—to urbanization and regional/local processes of change. Going from regional to local, multi-scale analysis of environmental change gives more opportunities to ascertain the combined effect of demographic dynamics on urbanization, evidencing the role of social transformations and the latent linkage with “hegemonic” concepts such as that of land degradation, which is intimately related with both socioeconomic dynamics and environmental sustainability. Reconnecting impacts of regional-scale socioeconomic change with local-scale ecological dynamics definitely contributes to an enriched knowledge of environmental histories, outlining how a study of differences under assumptions of non-linearity and complex system thinking is key to understand future socio-environmental trends in the study region. This contribution finally encourages studies within a multi-disciplinary arena, stimulating further literature reviews aimed at discussing these deserving issues—proposing new theoretical frameworks at the same time, with empirical approaches, comparative works and case studies providing the necessary, informed ground to science and policy.