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In their effort to rebuild the society of the host-nation, military organizations depend on collaboration and communication with other international contingents and the local population. Language understanding in this regard is of eminent importance. Linguistic skills and the intervention of interpreters could contribute to the inter-communicational process, and hence positively affect the general effectiveness of the mission as a whole. In this article theoretical concepts and notions are illustrated with empirical observations from everyday military practice during peace-support operations. The article concludes with avenues for future research.

The armed forces and the societies they come from, and/or work in are related to one another in a multitude of ways (for the following see Kümmel, 2002). An adequate theoretical framework to capture the relationship between what may be termed the military world and what may be termed the world out there is offered by the systems theory as, for example, put forward in Martin Edmonds’ Armed Services and Society (Edmonds, 1990: especially 113f.). In this vein, the armed services can be conceived as a system that is distinct from its environment and is in its interacting and interdependent component parts operating on specific systems logic. Thus the system (or rather the sub-system) of the armed forces can be analyzed in terms of its relationship with its environment and with other (sub-)systems that are working and operating in this environment. One may distinguish six – to be sure: interdependent and interpenetrated – dimensions to cover the richness of civil–military relations.¹ These are: economy, finances, technology, culture, society, and politics. But the complexity of the theoretical framework has to be advanced even further. Two additional points have to be dealt with. One is that the environment of the military the world out there falls into two different spheres; a national and an international one implying that these very six dimensions have to be seen in a national/domestic as well as in an international context. The second and last point is that these various dimensions of relations between the military and society look quite different depending on the point in time they are looked upon. In other words, the time factor has to be included into the analysis. According to the scheme resulting from this tableau, research issues can be grouped. The following table gives some examples for research topics that fall into the various categories and illustrate that the study of relations between the military and the society is an interdisciplinary undertaking (Table 1).

In this chapter, we focus on the processes of communication during peace missions in far-away countries, where local people in general do not master Western languages such as English and French. Afghanistan is such a country where the international community conducts large-scale peace operations that bring along many situations in which the military needs to talk to local people. In such situations, interpreters mastering the local languages (Darsi and Pasthtu) are needed. In our study, we focus on their work, how they think they should fulfil their task, and their relation between the military who hire them and the local people to which they in fact belong. This in-between position makes them strangers in their own country. Goffman's work on strategic interaction, the management of face and embarrassment as well as interaction rituals in general constitute the theoretical backbone of this study.

Performance management can play an important role in the implementation of strategic change, by aligning employees’ mindsets and behavior with organizational goals. However, the ways in which employees react to change efforts aided by performance management practices are far from straight-forward. In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding employees’ reactions to strategic change as a consequence of their occupational identities and their performance management outcome. We further apply the framework to an empirical study of a strategic change initiative in a school organization that was supported by a new performance management practice. We show how variations in perceived identity threat translate into four distinct patterns of emotional and behavioral reactions, where only one represents whole-hearted change acceptance. The study contributes to our understanding of individual- and group-level heterogeneity in reactions to strategic change, and also to a more nuanced conception of identity threat.

In recent decades, capitalist globalization has entailed a new international division of labor with the relocation of some stages of manufacturing production from the Center to the Periphery through the Global value chains (GVCs). This new pattern of global production is marked by wide income disparities between the different regions of the world economy, accentuated by value transfers hidden within both traditional and GVCs international trade. The chapter presents a theoretical model based on a Marxian approach for the accounting of unequal exchange in international trade in value-added, resulting from the decoupling of value-produced and value-captured inside and outside GVCs. The empirical results show the ongoing relevance of unequal exchange in contemporary capitalism as one of the fundamental causes of disparities in income and economic development among the countries of the global economy.

This research draws on qualitative interviews with primarily lower socioeconomic status (SES) public library internet users to illuminate their perceptions of economic benefits afforded by the internet. This powerful evidence challenges utopian new technological theories. The results from this study allow for the comparison of perspectives from Millennials, Generation Xers, Boomers, and the Silent generation. These results suggest a disconnect between the cultural mythology around the internet as an all-powerful tool and the lived experiences of lower SES respondents. Lower SES participants primarily use the internet to train and educate themselves in areas where they would like to work in the process of applying for jobs using the internet. Participants recognized marginal benefits such as socialization and less burdensome job application processes. However, they struggled to identify significant job-related benefits when comparing applying for jobs online as opposed to applying for jobs in person. With the exception of millennials, all generational groups believed in the economic promise of the internet to make their lives easier given enough time. Millennials, however, challenged the techno-utopianism expressed by other generations. Only millennials recognized the realities of digital inequalities that make techno-utopian outcomes unattainable given broader economic realities for low-SES individuals.