Military-civilian elite networks in israel: A case study in boundary structure

This article addresses an issue which, although ostensibly considered important by many researchers, has been neglected for years at both the empirical and the theoretical levels. Since the 1950s, when it came into its own as a subdiscipline, military sociology has become increasingly complex with respect to the topics, scholarly disciplines and methodologies on which it draws. One may even discern several distinct generations of research on the subject, each with its own special characteristics.' As in other disciplines, the focus of research in military sociology has not remained static. It has undergone certain changes because of the influential personality and scholarly authority of several dominant researchers, and because of extraneous factors that occasionally diverted interest to other matters.