A Bourdieusian Analysis of the U.S. Military’s Incapacity For Positive Deviance

Introduction

Consider the possibility that there is no such thing as a single ideal group structure or system of governance, that there is no objectively correct organizational shape, ratio of leaders-to-followers, or management approach. Groups of human beings have always had to collectively negotiate their structure and operating systems based on culture, needs, history, perspectives, and context, all of which change and thus drive the need for systemic change. We may always have constraints to account for in designing and managing social systems, such as individual cognitive capacity to foster a given number of close relationships (Dunbar et al, 2018). Governance and group structure constantly shift as a result of factors which are always in flux, are highly subjective, or are dependent on which outcomes we value (e.g., the needs of the group vs. the needs of individuals), it is reasonable to expect that, to quote Heraclitus, “Nothing endures but change.”

What if a group loses its capacity to adapt? What if the group gets “stuck” and, despite all those changing factors, their unchanging structure and systems of governance lose coherence with the context and values of the moment? I argue that this “stuckness” is a dilemma that we face in much of the structure and governance of the U.S. military, with only occasional exceptions. For most of the force, we are uncritically recreating the social systems that have been handed down to us, and are failing to consider whether other configurations might serve us better. Research in sociology can help explain some of the origins of this “stuckness” and perhaps offer a way of understanding how we might become unstuck.

In The Dawn of Everything, Wengrow and Graeber (2022) share an expansive history of the ways in which human societies have organized themselves throughout the last 30,000 years: social and political experimentation led to massive variety in the shapes that societies took across the globe. Wengrow and Graeber assert that it is only in the last few thousand years that we have gotten stuck in a particular mode of political configurations and practices, and our views of the nature of prehistoric societies have been crude, cartoonish, and inaccurate. One inaccuracy they dispel is the common belief that the primary means of subsistence was a binary switch (hunter-gatherer to agrarian) that was flipped once, and that this singular material factor led inevitably to the development of bureaucracies, hierarchies, states, and either better or worse conditions for humanity depending on which side of the Rousseau/Hobbes “state of nature” divide one subscribes. This traditional and widespread view of a linear evolutionary history of social structure responding almost exclusively to changes in economy and means of subsistence is grounded in Marx’s Historical Materialism (Tian, 2022). At its most extreme, it suggests that a linear history of social evolution from nomadic hunter-gatherers to agrarian cities to city-states to modern states was basically inevitable the moment humans made that switch from forager to farmer, because the technology of static practices of cultivation brought with it the drive and incentives to establish economies of scale, property laws, distribution of labor, and by some accounts the phenomenon of patriarchal domination of society (Hansen et al., 2015). The reality, as Wengrow and Graeber present it, is far more interesting than that. They share examples of hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and hybrid societies at various scales, making deliberate and divergent choices about the structures of their societies, the ways that they structured work, apportioned power, and experimented with concepts like property ownership. Some societies might have transitioned between social forms from season to season, changing shape and structure in order to suit the conditions of scarcity or abundance. They describe the same group of people rearranging socially to be flat and egalitarian for a period of months and then morphing into a rigid, hierarchical structure when economies-of-scale and top-down control became useful features. This degree of flexibility and deliberateness in the selection of social forms conflicts with an essentialist version of Historical Materialism, suggesting that whatever the economic or subsistence circumstances, people have always had freedom to choose and experiment with systems of governance, which they appear to have exercised freely, taking into account far more than just subsistence production, incorporating mature value systems and often weighing heavily the well-being and agency of individuals.

Examples of Organizational Transformation

While Wengrow and Graeber might argue that at the scale of states we are relatively unadaptive compared to prehistoric times, we can see clear adaptation in the record of how we organize and manage humans at the scale of institutions. Throughout history, organizations have taken on a wide variety of shapes and employed various governance theories and systems to match their context and gain competitive advantage. There has been a particularly active series of developments over the last century or so in the evolution of organizational management, structure, and process, often in response to technological developments or changes in production creating material conditions for such transformations to occur (coherent with the lens of Historical Materialism). An example of such an evolutionary sequence in organizational structure and process can be found in the literature of organizational sociology:

In 1776, amidst the advances of the Industrial Revolution, the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith articulated in The Wealth of Nations how division of labor and specialization increased the efficiency of manufactories and offered implications that amounted to early economic theory. Despite concepts of division of labor having already been developed almost a century earlier by Medieval Persian scholars (Hosseini, 1998), the timing of Smith’s work found fertile ground for social impact. In the early 1900’s, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who we might call the father of modern management consulting, elaborated on Smith’s concepts to develop organizational theories of scientific management. The heart of his Principles of Scientific Management (1911) was the pursuit of economic efficiency through an empirical approach to the standardization of work, selecting talent, training workers, and managing them closely in the execution of that work to ensure adherence to the established, standardized practice (Champoux, 2016). The material context for Taylor’s advances in management thinking was the factory, to which an engineering-based approach proved particularly effective. But Taylor’s Scientific Management was not without downsides, and either from widespread misimplementation or an overly zealous one, workers suffered under the lack of attention paid to their well-being, and it was out of these conditions that the “human relations” management approach emerged. Automobiles brought a subsequent technological revolution, which gave rise to the assembly-line method of production but also increased the volatility and diversity of consumer markets. The single product-line factory paradigm was not flexible or market-focused enough, and thus managers like Alfred Sloan at General Motors developed a “strategy-and-structure” approach which enabled the development of multiple product-lines aimed at different markets, sharing parts across those product lines. The highly-respected management theorist Peter Drucker was one of the first to articulate the underlying theories of that approach to a wider audience. The next major iteration in management theory was what later came to be known as the Toyota Production System, which focused on decreasing waste, continuous improvement, and increasing quality rather than focusing merely on production (Bodrožić et al, 2018).

In this sequence spanning only a few decades, we see a sample of how contextual and values shifts have informed advances and adaptations in structure and management theory. Organizational evolutions have only accelerated in subsequent decades with Total Quality Management, Lean, the computer and telecommunications technological revolution leading to Agile, Scrum, and transformative new forms such as telework, for which innovative new organizational operating systems are still emerging. In modern days, entire organizations operate in disparate locations across the globe; their shapes and management methods might seem nonsensical to someone working in a factory in 1915.

On the Military Being Stuck

I argue that some of these organizational operating systems might also seem entirely foreign to many who work in the United States military today. While many sectors have evolved, most military units still operate largely using structure and management paradigms developed decades if not centuries ago, with organizational charts that are identical across disparate contexts and domains, anchored heavily in approaches of Scientific Management (Holden, 2016), using a rank structure of commissioned officers and enlisted troops–an organizational paradigm that hearkens back to the time of feudal lords who could be called upon by a king to Marshal their troops. The degree of uniformity in structure and in management style across the military in disparate domains of work, and its inability to let go of paradigms from times long past indicates that in some ways, the military must be stuck.

In remarks to the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum annual conference in October 2022, the entrepreneur, educator, and author Steve Blank referred to the DoD as “an execution organization attempting to innovate”. Blank articulated a similar pattern in large organizations in the private sector in the following way, “Today, as large organizations are facing continuous disruption, they’ve recognized that their existing strategy and organizational structures aren’t nimble enough to access and mobilize the innovative talent and technology they need to meet these challenges” (Blank, 2019). His suggestion to the DoD in that 2022 appearance was “If you want to innovate, change the org chart.” To put it another way, form must adapt to function, but we’ve clearly found ourselves stuck in a form fit for an execution context. So what impedes necessary adaptation?

Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (2006) popularized the concept of the learning organization–an entity that responds and adapts its structure and practices based on changes and needs in context, values, and desired impacts. Senge incorporates the concept of mental models into his theory of learning organizations, stating that institutional learning is a result of management teams updating their shared mental models. If we don’t change our internal conception of the world, ourselves, or our environment, we are incapable of making significant changes, and according to Senge, it’s the mental models of leaders that drive organizational paradigms and behavior. The concept of mental models in this case aligns well with what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as schemes of perception, thought, and action, which are part of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1989). Levya (2018) describes these components of habitus as schemas, and makes the case that they are broadly and empirically supported by computational-representational theories of cognition. Bourdieu’s framing of the habitus as that which, through schemes of action, causes us to recreate social structures, aligns well with Senge’s assertion that without changing mental models, there is no change to the organization, as their schemes of perception and practice conflict with the desired change and they are likely to behave in ways that recreate the same structures that they have occupied. Combining all these ideas into one, we could thus say that organizational learning is a product of individuals within an organization updating their schemes of classification and perception, rendering the social entity as a whole capable of constructing practice and structure that diverges from the status-quo.

Research Questions

The concept of being stuck in a configuration despite having no predetermined or objective ideal social structure challenges the ways that we might tend to view society at the scale of states, but becomes easier to swallow when we zoom in to the scale of organizations. In this paper, I would like to try and answer why the U.S. military finds itself stuck in a particular unwavering paradigm of shape, structure, process, and management theory that I refer to as the “Organizational Operating System.” To answer this question of how the military might be stuck, I propose the following considerations:

1. How can Bourdieu’s theories of habitus reveal what enables or inhibits transformation of organizational operating systems?

2. What are the sources of friction in this transformation process?

3. What unique attributes of the U.S. military explain the failure of most military organizations to adapt, even when adaptation would be strategically advantageous?

4. Assuming organizational learning and adaptation is desirable, what should we therefore do to increase our capacity as learning organizations?

Social Concepts and Theories

The following social concepts and theories can help illuminate the more complex ideas in this paper:

● Habitus - Internal schemas of perception, motivation, and behavior imparted on individuals within a cultural field, which lead to individuals exercising their agency to reconstruct those same structures, in part motivated by the pursuit of cultural and social capital. (Bourdieu, 1990)

● Split habitus (habitus clivé) - When the habitus of an individual is simultaneously structured by two or more disparate social fields (Boudieu, 2001).

● Cultural Capital - Knowledge of social norms and embodied know-how which enables a person to fluently function within a field

● Social Capital - Titles, roles, status, and symbols of such that give people power and influence within a field

● Doxa - Unspoken tradition; ideas and actions that are beyond questioning in society

● Interest Convergence - The theory that the interests of a marginalized group will be considered seriously only when they converge with the interests of the dominant group (Delgado et al, 2017).

● Total Institution - An institution that exerts near complete control over the social structures and experiences within a field, in part by isolating members from other social fields (Goffman & Helmreich, 2017).

Literature Review

Bridget Fowler’s article “Pierre Bourdieu on social transformation, with particular reference to political and symbolic revolutions” (2020) details how Bourdieu describes the process of social and symbolic revolution and how habitus and the structures of a cultural field make way for deviation and transformation to occur. To Bourdieu, crises, in particular those which pose a threat to the status of the educated, play a prominent role in the enablement of social transformation. A convergence or synchronization of conflict across various fields have the capacity to render habitus as incoherent or “maladjusted” with the current structure, creating a margin of possible change. Fowler also introduces Bourdieu’s theories on how the introduction of outsiders, whose habitus is not informed by the field, can create conditions for innovation. Bourdieu also posited that those within a social field whose habitus is split (by being a combination of insider and outsider) can serve as innovators or “social revolutionaries” with the unique combination of capacity to exercise cultural capital and social capital possessed as insiders (which gives them power within the social field) with a propensity to challenge orthodoxies, from which, as outsiders, they deviate.

In “From Working in the Fields to Taking Control. Towards a Typology of Women’s Decision‑Making in Wheat in India,” Farworth et al. (2021) analyze a social transformation that has been taking place in India in which women play an increasing role in agriculture as both laborers and decision-makers, conflicting with long-held, unquestioned beliefs (doxa) about the rightful positions of women in society. The authors describe the process through which doxa becomes first visible and then questioned due to wider changes in society, after which it may be codified into orthodoxy. They offer that even orthodoxies can be subverted over time due to larger societal changes, such as the outmigration of men from agriculture to take advantage of new economic opportunities (a social mobility generally not extended to women). Casting off the doxa of “who does what” frees men up to engage in off-farm work. Interest convergence could be understood to play a role in these shifts, providing the basis for support from both men and local shopkeepers, who have a vested interest in renting machinery to women, equipping them to succeed in their divergence from social norms.

In “Conceptualising Subjectivities and Rationalities in Understanding Gendered Violence: Processes of Social and Cultural Change,” Bradley et al. (2021) employ Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to understand the web of social, institutional, and environmental dimensions that support and reinforce gender-based violence, and how cultural capital and social sanctions enforce those supporting dimensions. They argue that a framework of “social norms” is overly reductive and fails to take into account the processual dynamics of relationships and motivations that a Bourdieusian analysis is particularly equipped to capture. They detail how public interventions often fail to achieve real effects by failing to account for the complex factors that inform the habitus of the cultural field within which the negative effect is happening. They frame one of the necessary conditions for change in these circumstances as collective agency and cooperation. One obstacle to achieving such cooperation is the motivation of individuals to work together on behalf of the “best interest of society,” even at their own expense. The perception that deviance might pose a threat to the interests of the collective creates motivational friction

reducing investment and commitment to a social change, which prevents the type of cooperation necessary to challenge entrenched practices and structures. Habitus, being a reflection and enforcing function of social position, motivates individuals to act in ways that legitimate and reproduce social structures. Bourdieu posits that to experience belonging within a social field, one must have unquestioning faith in the field. The degree of investment this drives makes possible alternatives inaccessible. The motivations and underlying logic of the reinforcing behaviors become invisible to the actors, seeming only natural and inherent rather than chosen or strictly enforced. In order to challenge and resist such surreptitiously supported social structures, we have to surface and become aware of the habitus that structures and is structured by them. Consciousness is only the first step to facilitate such resistance. The authors recommend such consciousness be acquired in group form, to create a strong network of relationships and achieve the cooperation and collective agency required to create and sustain motivation and momentum for a social-change cause.

In “Rethinking Role Residual: Retired Police Officers and the Inertia of Habitus,” Parnaby and Weston (2020) examine how even amidst a changing social field, individuals maintain emotional, cognitive, and behavioral patterns based on a role they have occupied for some time. The authors looked specifically at how patterns of perception and behavior developed as police officers persisted among individuals even well after retirement from that role and context. Bourdieu’s concepts were employed to describe a type of “habitus inertia” experienced particularly when the subsequent, post-role field is at least somewhat congruent with the role-specific habitus. Because the habitus has a reflexive relationship with the field (meaning its schemas and dispositions are shaped and reinforced by interaction with the field), an increased distance from the conditions of the previous role will result in the schemas and patterns of behavior developed as part of that role to “waste away or weaken through lack of use” (Bourdieu 2000, p. 162).

An article by Aya Shoshan titled “Habitus and social movements: how militarism affects organizational repertoires” analyzes organizational patterns of leadership and practice within social movements. Shoshan uses the concept of repertoires of action to describe how activists draw from a limited set of options for action based on experience and exposure. They articulate that repertoires are not ideological in nature, meaning they are not necessarily enforced ideas of how things should be done, but instead are routinized practices reinforced through mechanisms of habitus. Alternatives beyond the repertoire are not selected simply because they cannot be imagined. Examples offered in the piece include the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose flat, decentralized structure was informed by the civil rights movement and the Zapatistas, among others. The author highlights how organizational habitus can originate in fields entirely unrelated to the fields in which they are applied, and illustrates this with the example of a 2011 Israeli activist movement whose members employed modes of organization and leadership developed as habitus within a military context due to certain movement participants’ experience in the Israeli military sphere. As a result, power was concentrated, centralized, and the structure of the activist group was hierarchical, in contrast to many social movements across the world that frequently take flatter, more decentralized forms.

Morteza Hashemi, in “Bedouins of Silicon Valley: A neo-Khaldunian approach to sociology of technology” introduces a fascinating framing of the habitus of the bootstrapped, garage-based start-ups of Silicon Valley who often succeed at disrupting established tech-firms. Hashemi draws on the social theories of Ibn Khaldun from his 14th Century text The Muqaddimah (1377). Khaldun theorized a distinction between urban dwellers and Bedouins based on what he called asabiyya (group feeling), a characteristic that might include aspects of connectedness, mutual trust, affinity, affection, solidarity, and mutual-aid. Bedouins, living in harsher conditions of the desert, benefitted from the training and skill offered by facing constant minor and major crises, and their shared religion amplified their asabiyya. In contrast, those who dwelled in cities lived sedentary lives of security and disconnection. This ultimately created conditions for a cycle in which Bedouins would conquer a city, become city-dwellers themselves, and then over the course of about four generations devolve from relying on and valuing achieved useful qualities (such as those honed in the harsh deserts) to blindly valuing and orienting around the traditions passed down from their ancestors, causing them to be vulnerable to being disrupted and overtaken by those now living the Bedouin lifestyle. Hashemi suggests that the harsh conditions and the asabiyya may be closely linked, as coping with harsh conditions requires prolonged and frequent interactions which directly contribute to mutual emotional commitment, affinity, and unity. Khaldun referred to the aptitude (malakah) of Bedouins, which Hashemi finds similar to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, though Bourdieu considered crisis to be a point at which habitus ceases to function (referenced in discussion of Fowler above). A Bourdieusian analysis of Khaldun’s observations therefore might indicate that city-dwellers are operating on habitus while Bedouins are habituated to regular disruption of habitus which makes them excellent ad-hoc strategists and agile but unified operators in uncertainty. Hashemi articulates how Silicon Valley startups (seen as Bedouins) can be understood to accumulate know-how and agile reflexes as coherent groups through the shared experience of navigating constant crisis in the harsh conditions of trying to attain and retain viability from a garage somewhere that makes them powerful disruptors of the sedentary, comfortable, established incumbent tech firms who are preoccupied with habitus-driven recreation of existing social systems, free from any internal or external incentive to shift, adapt, or reinvent themselves. Hashemi goes on to describe how the focus of those who face little crisis is on the past, while those who face constant crisis and the need to continuously scan for paths to viability are informed by the future or potential futures.

Discussion

Sociological factors that enable or inhibit the evolution and adaptation of organizational operating systems are addressed fairly explicitly in the reviewed literature. Fowler makes the case that organizations can change when the habitus of those who occupy them is disrupted or rendered maladjusted by conditions of crisis. Applied to military organizations, this insight about the function of crisis offers ample explanation for why a majority of the force could be understood to be stuck in the Khaldunian role of “city dwellers”, given the fact that most military organizations face a total absence of actual, existential crisis, in any sense of the word. Exceptions to this are informative and can be seen with entities such as the Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF), whose members have been among the most actively engaged with genuine warfighting during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their members and leadership could be understood to harbor the asabiyya and aptitude of Bedouins, honed through continual engagement with the “harsh deserts” of repeated deployment punctuated by training. Their capacity for what Senge refers to as “organizational learning,” driven by regular reflexive interaction with their field of practice, is well-documented. The crisis-driven transformation of the JSOTF from hierarchical, centralized structure and management paradigms that we see in most military units was captured in General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams (2015). Though many military leaders have tried to take the insights shared by McChrystal and apply them within their own organizations, a sociological lens tells us that those attempting such reformations are doing so anchored by a habitus honed for the conditions they actually face. For a majority of the military force, those conditions have little direct relationship with warfighting and rarely encounter any kind of crisis. Military members face perhaps insurmountable obstacles within a system where social and cultural capital is earned primarily through compliance and effective recreation of social structures, with costs to cultural capital far outweighing potential gain from risk-taking and experimentation.

Fowler offers a means for social structures to be disrupted through dilution or deviation from habitus facilitated by the introduction of “outsiders” or those with split habitus. A majority of the leadership of the military gained the social and cultural capital that underlies and is made manifest by their positions of power through the demonstration of adherence to the strictures and structures of the systems that they now lead. It would be a feat of serious and sustained trickery to somehow maintain an even partial outside habitus through the crucible of a career where social enforcement of norms occurs with a regularity and amplitude hardly matched by any other institution. The military constitutes what Goffman referred to as a “total institution” (Goffman & Helmreich, 2017), meaning it exerts a degree of social control over the habitus-structuring social structures within a field that renders resistance futile. Scott (2010) attributed this resilience to more than merely the top-down authoritative enforcement of the institution itself. A habitus of conformity across the social field creates a web of enforcement from all angles, including peers and subordinates. An example could be found in the recent case of Army Major General Patrick Donahoe, whose active engagement with Soldiers on Twitter, seen by many as a positive deviation into a more engaged, digitally adept form of leadership, resulted in a flurry of allegations of impropriety that prompted an extensive Inspector General investigation and potential negative career impact (Singer, 2022). Another example would be the outcry from veterans and service members of other branches in response to the U.S. Space Force announcement that they are exploring alternatives to conventional approaches to physical fitness regimes and testing. Even when the U.S. military is not internally enforcing against deviation from norms of social structure and practice, there are clear signals from the American public objecting to deviation on a cultural basis, demonstrated most recently by the outcry of right-wing political voices in response to military efforts at advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within its institutions. Farworth, et al. provide evidence of a possible pathway for deviation from doxa and orthodoxy in the case that larger societal changes create affordances for change within the specific field, especially when instrumental stakeholders within that field experience interest convergence with those who would bring about the change. The concept of Goffman’s total institution is useful in considering the potential of change through this route as well, as a total institution effectively isolates itself from the larger society. Further, a total institution holds a monopoly on the extension of cultural capital, ensuring that few interests can exist that aren’t actively modulated by the institution itself, making interest convergence that isn’t aligned with the institution’s goals nearly impossible to come by. This offers an explanation for a common phenomenon in which those who have, in one way or another, cast off the motivational factor of promotion, either by somehow abandoning any hope of promotion or due to an impending retirement, are suddenly enabled to deviate and pursue change aligned to values and interests that the institution often fails to account for. The consideration of long-term livelihood and career progress appears to exert such a significant influence on individuals that it drowns out interest convergence on almost any factor.

Bradley et al. suggest that collective agency and cooperation are instrumental in achieving social change, most easily and often undermined by the motivations of individuals to work only in the “best interest of society”. In the military, this concept of disregarding personal interests for the sake of the greater good is heavily enforced, expressed in the Air Force’s core values as “service before self”. What could be more selfish than aligning yourself with interests that violate the integrity of the institution? Military members are occupied by a habitus that considers only those values and interests emanating from the centralized, hierarchical core of the institution as valuable, and institutional integrity (lack of internal variance) is often tied to warfighting efficacy. Bradley et al. also touch on the concept of “belonging,” acquired through unquestioning faith in the social field, as one of the things that renders possible alternatives invisible. This also resonates with the concept of “organizational repertoires” from Shoshan’s article, as our capacity to deviate from established norms is severely limited by our capacity to imagine alternatives. A total institution prevents the expansion of these repertoires rendering military leaders incapable of drawing on alternative practices and paradigms, much less achieving any semblance of collective agency to push for their employment.

Recommendations and Conclusion

In the course of this essay, I have examined habitus and various interpretations of its effects with regard to social and organizational transformation. We find patterns that offer answers to the research questions that began this paper. Particularly in the U.S. military, there are enormous barriers to experimentation with organizational operating systems at both a micro and macro level, and some enormously effective hindrances to becoming what Senge referred to as a learning organization. To enable military leaders to be fully capable of updating mental models to deviate from those passed down through tradition, we would need to directly target those institutional forces structuring a habitus that makes deviation, risk-taking, and experimentation invisible (outside our organizational repertoire), costly (economically, socially, and culturally), and effectively isolated (incapable of achieving synchronization and collective agency).

Some may misinterpret the Khaldunian critique to say that we must immerse ourselves in situations that reinforce a "warfighting" habitus, and we should be clear that this reading dangerously misses the point. The uniform application of mental models unrelated to the domains in which military leaders actually operate serves as a barrier to sense-making and learning within their context. Many already insist that the institution and those who lead it consider all of their work as a function of “warfighting” and “in the pursuit of lethality,” often as a basis for reinforcing a military habitus, many aspects of which make little sense in the direct context of most military members’ jobs. A military member working in a warehouse or with software in an office environment would likely be best served by aligning their mental models and habitus (therefore their habits and instincts of sense-making) with the context of that actual work, unhindered by a habitus informed by wars being fought thousands of miles away, or fought decades or centuries ago. To align ourselves to models, structures, and paradigms passed down out of a logic of tradition in this way only orients us, like Khaldun’s city-dwellers, towards an abstracted past, when we should be like the Bedouins, informed by the facing of crises within our actual domains of practice and therefore poised and prepared by an orientation towards possible futures of that domain. Such a transformation of orientation, grounded in interactions with our compatriots in pursuit of learning and increased efficacy against the creation of real-world (not abstract) value for the institution and our piece of the mission also has the potential to directly impact the asabiyya and therefore coherence and mutual trust of the social entity, as interactions become more frequent and meaningful, thus helping us form mental models grounded in the present and oriented toward the future.

Parnaby and Weston’s examination of “role residual” provides clues to the possible pursuit of habitus transformation. They offer that immersion in a field that differs and is distant from that which instilled the residual habits of perception and action creates conditions within which the persistent habitus can atrophy and shift. Programs that take the military member out of the entrenched field of the military environment should be considered a useful option for both destructuring the problematic habitus and also creating opportunity for a split habitus to emerge, opening up yet more pathways for the transformation we seek to take root, as Fowler shared. The benefits of split habitus-equipped members lie not only in the expansion of their repertoires of action and capacity for enacting social change, but should also be understood as likely enhancing their capacity for sense-making within multiple fields and therefore the potential quality of their judgment about what needs to change, as singular-field-informed mental models/habitus limit the schemes of perception from which an individual can draw, making those most aligned to the total institution the least capable of perceiving opportunities for positive deviation.

Interventions should not be limited to merely how we should target and change the minds of individuals that occupy this total institution, for example through altering the way we train and educate. Because habitus is both structured and structuring, a processual phenomenon that exists within and between individuals and the structures they occupy, its transformation depends on changing the conditions within which it emerges. A de-structuring of that total institution, to loosen its total grip on the habitus-structuring paradigms of its embedded fields, could create affordances for new paths to positive change. On this note, I’ll share a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig:

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

Consider the possibility that there is no such thing as a single ideal group structure or system of governance–that there is no objectively correct organizational shape, ratio of leaders-to-followers, or management paradigm. Consider that the uniformity of approach to leadership and structure across a majority of the United States Military is therefore a clear signal that we have somehow gotten stuck--that the capacity for reflexive engagement with the domains of practice within which disparate military organizations operate has somehow been stunted by generations of military leaders facing too little crisis, constrained by a habitus of city-dwellers who blindly reenact tradition rather than taking risks, experimenting, and making their units into learning organizations. Consider what kinds of futures we might create if we could get ourselves unstuck.

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