“Respect” as a personal attribute in the British Army

Charles Kirke

Defense & Security Analysis, 2015, vol. 31, issue 1, 74-82

Abstract: This article describes the results of research into the social phenomenon of “respect” as framed by junior members of the British Army, as part of a wider study into the Values and Standards of the British Army. This research was interview based, using qualitative analysis software to detect, manage, and draw conclusions from the qualitative data recorded in those interviews. The data indicated that the primary situation in which “respect” was visualised by the participants was the unit context, and that it comprised a combination of three different strands: respect for rank or “hierarchical respect,” “professional respect” for a person's military competence, and “personal respect” for an individual's character, personal behaviour, and attributes. The overall respect that an individual is given arises from the combination of these three areas. “Respect” as a concept was, in the soldiers’ characterisation, something that had to be earned (except for the “given” represented by rank) and was not stable: a person's fund of respect could go up or down in social value. Respect was also linked to trust: the more respect a person had, the more they could be trusted. Although the unit context was the primary one for discussing their framing of the concept of respect, many of the participants reported a wider dimension in which every human being deserves a basic level of respect simply for being human, and this level could not be forfeited.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14751798.2015.1014156 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdanxx:v:31:y:2015:i:1:p:74-82

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDAN20

DOI: 10.1080/14751798.2015.1014156

Access Statistics for this article

Defense & Security Analysis is currently edited by Martin Edmonds

More articles in Defense & Security Analysis from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().