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TACTICAL THOUGHT
2014 September 29 th
First, my experience is that a single officer can have a strong impact on the military
system as a whole. Secondly, my interest in Bourdieu can be traced to his background in
Algeria during the insurgency in the 50s; his critics in the academia were mostly
uninterested in deeper self-reflection and criticised his endeavours in the practical use of
academic research. My experience of a limited interest in military sociology in Swedish
officer education and my interest in methodological development for War Studies can
also be traced to the encounter with Bourdieu. I believe that it is important to analyse
relations between the standpoints and background factors, for example, officers' roles,
rank, unit affiliation and education. I believe that such an approach is important to be
incorporated in the thinking for research development of War Studies research.
In summary, the above reasons and motives applied to my thinking in general, and I
decided to proceed with an adaption of the Bourdieu approach of field theory. To
summarize the theoretical basis; I have a constructionist approach with my ontological
perspective. Regarding the literature study; a Begriefsgesichte approach is discussed
with Koselleck’s experience and expectation concept. Finally, the empirical analysis of
standpoints and background factors are discussed with a field theory approach. With
these theoretical notions, we now turn to the methodology descriptions.
2.4 Methodology
The study uses three methodological approaches. First; a qualitative textual and content
analysis of a conceptual history approach for the literature study. Secondly; interviews
with open-ended questions and multi-choice answers for data collection from the
officers. 113 Finally, the main method for the investigation is a so-called sociological
prosopography, meaning, collecting and analysing data concerning the structured
pattern of officers’ standpoints and background factors. 114 Concepts, such as capital and
field developed by Bourdieu and his collaborators and followers, are used as tools in the
work.
The textual analysis is described in the appendixes presenting the literature study and
the normative doctrine analysis. 115 The sociological prosopography analysis of
standpoints, background factor positions and relational structure has been done using
Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). MCA is a method particularly suitable for
analysis, combining different kinds of aspects as they do here, i.e. relational structures
of standpoints and background factors.
113 Appendix 2. The Interview Guide.
114 Donald Broady, ´French prosopography. Definition and suggested readings´, Poetics Volume 30,
Issues 5-6, October-December 2002, pp. 381-385, digital version at
http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/p-broady-0605-frenchprosop.htm
115 Appendix1. The Literature Study and Appendix 8. Results from a Doctrine study on tactics in COIN.
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