Anthropology Commons^™

Culture And Military Effectiveness: How Societal Traits Influence Battle Outcomes, Eric Stephen Fowler

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

What must states do to ensure victory on the field of battle? Conventional scholarship claims that a number of material and institutional factors significantly affect a nation’s ability to generate military power. Recent studies suggest that other factors, including levels of education, civil-military relations, and western culture also play an important role. This new line of logic is important because these factors tend to be glaringly absent from rigorous concepts of military power. The principle finding of this study is that culture matters and that it matters more than originally thought. Culture is admittedly complex, intangible, and difficult to count, …

The Role Of Diversity On Team Effectiveness In A Multinational And Multicultural Military Environment, Mustafa Utoglu

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The trend of deploying multinational coalition or alliance forces to respond to emerging threats in the past two decades has become a conventional approach. Beyond the advantages presented by coalitions and alliances, the literature suggests that multinational forces have raised a new set of challenges in achieving their mission: managing the demographic, functional, and cultural diversity introduced by the individuals from various nations that compose the coalition/alliance.

A large number of researchers have considered diversity a "double-edged sword" as they discovered that diversity could pose risks, as well as benefits, to teamwork. Although extensive research effort has been dedicated to …