ABSTRACT
For this research it was not possible to begin the fieldwork without permission to interview. A military institution is a bureaucratic and hierarchical organization. Taking this into account, I wondered with whom I had to initiate contact, since I did not know anyone in the Army.2 In order for me to pursue a Ph.D. thesis, the main question initially seemed to concern how to begin. At that moment, my research interest was to analyze the way in which young military officers attributed meaning to their role as military men (their identity). This was valuable in the context of the important educational, normative and organizational reforms that were taking place in the Argentinean Armed Forces. The new missions and the vanishing of conflict hypothesis seemed to draw the military towards tasks closer to those of civilians and not men of arms (Moskos et al. 2000). I wanted to deepen the evaluations and meanings attributed by young military officers to this new institutional reality. Several tasks began simultaneously. First of all, I had to have a clear understanding of the characteristics of the institution I wished to enter in order to plan an entrance strategy. The revision of the existing literature, both theoretical and empirical, heightened my understanding of the particularities of the military organizations; which are, as I have just said, formal and hierarchically stratified institutions. Briefly, we can state that given their size and nature, these are socially complex organizations; they have a public nature and are highly differentiated in the interior. Also, the extensive literature points out that there are few complex organizations with such capacity for control over the individual actions of its members (Abrahamson 1985; Janowitz 1985). Therefore, it is possible to understand the Army as a bureaucracy in which there are no formal counter-power mechanisms and limitations of legal authority.
