Military Sociology
regimental unit replacement personnel transfer poli-
cies whereby a whole military unit’s personnel, and
dependent families, relocate together as a group from
one military assignment to another; and (e) making it
mandatory for military personnel to subject them-
selves to inoculations, experimental drugs and thera-
peutics, or, owing to insufficient supplies, withholding
drug treatments for some personnel.
Military psychologists, therefore, have the oppor-
tunity to participate in the enactment of social and
organizational change in the military, and their work
can have far-reaching implications for society at large.
See also: Engineering Psychology; Military and Dis-
aster Psychiatry
Bibliography
Crawford M P 1970 Military psychology and general psycho-
logy. American Psychologist 25: 328–36
Cronin C (ed.) 1998 Military Psychology: an Introduction. Simon
and Schuster, Needham Heights, MA
Gal R, Mangelsdorff A D (eds.) 1991 Handbook of Military
Psychology. Wiley, Chichester, UK
Glenn J F, Burr R E, Hubbard R W, Mays M Z, Moore R J,
Jones B H, Krueger G P (eds.) 1991 Sustaining Health and
Performance in the Desert: En
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for Operations in Southwest Asia. USARIEM Technical Note
Nos. 91-1 and 91-2, pocket version. DTIC Nos. AD: A229-
643 and AD: A229-846. US Army Research Institute of
Environmental Medicine, Natick, MA
Johnson E 1991 Foreword In: Gal R, Mangelsdorff A D (eds.)
Handbook of Military Psychology. Wiley, Chichester, UK, pp.
xxi–xxiv
Krueger G P 1991 Introduction of section 3: Environmental
factors and military perspectives In: Gal R, Mangelsdorff A D
(eds.) Handbook of Military Psychology. Wiley, Chichester,
UK, pp. 211–13
Krueger G P 1998 Military performance under adverse con-
ditions In: Cronin C (ed.) Military Psychology: An Intro-
duction. Simon and Schuster, Needham Heights, MA, pp.
88–111
Krueger G P 2000 Military culture. In: Kazdin A E (ed.)
Encyclopedia of Psychology. American Psychological Asso-
ciation, Washington, DC and Oxford University Press, New
York, Vol. 5, pp. 252–59
Krueger G P, Banderet L E 1997 Effects of chemical protective
clothing on military performance: a review of the issues.
Military Psychology 9: 255–86
Mangelsdorff A D 2000 Military psychology: history of the field.
In: Kazdin A E (ed.) Encyclopedia of Psychology. American
Psychological Association, Washington, DC and Oxford
University Press, New York, Vol. 5, pp. 259–63
Parsons H M 1972 Man–Machine System Experiments. Johns
Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD
Stouffer S A, Lumsdaine A A, Lumsdaine M H, Williams R M,
Smith M B, Janis I L, Star S A, Cottrell L S 1949 The
American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, Vol. II
Taylor H L Alluisi E A 1994 Military psychology. In: Rama-
chandran V S (ed.) Encyclopedia of Human Beha
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demic Press, New York, Vol. 3, pp. 191–201
Uhlaner J E 1968 The Research Psychologist in the Army—1917
to 1967. US Army Behavioral Science Research Laboratory
Technical Research Report No. 1155, US Army Behavioral
Science Research Laboratory, Arlington, VA
Wiskoff M F (ed.) 1988–99 Military Psychology: The Official
Journal of the Di
ision of Military Psychology, American
Psychological Association. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ
Wiskoff M F 1997 Defense of the nation: military psychologists.
In: Sternberg R J (ed.) Career Paths in Psychology: Where
Your Degree Can Take You. American Psychological As-
sociation, Washington, DC, Chap. 13, pp. 245–68
Zinchenko V, Munipov V 1989 Fundamentals of Ergonomics.
Progress, Moscow
G. P. Krueger
Military Sociology
The study of armed forces is somewhat of an anomaly
in the sociological discipline. Although possessing an
extensive and cumulative literature, the sociology of
the military is rarely included in the university cur-
riculum. Moreover, discipline boundaries for students
of the armed forces have been exceptionally per-
meable. Sociologists of the armed forces have long
relied on the work of other students of military in such
allied disciplines as political science, psychology, and
history. In recent years, there has been an increasing
overlap with peace studies and national security
studies. Beyond academia there is a larger group—
variously, present and past members of the military,
defenders and critics of military organization, and
journalists—who both give insights and serve as a
corrective for professional sociologists of the military.
Indeed, few substantive areas in sociology have such a
diffuse and broad constituency as does the study of
armed forces and society.
One readily observed trend in the sociological study
of military phenomena is its widening purview. Where
earlier accounts saw the military as a self-contained
organizational entity, contemporary accounts regard
the military and civilian spheres as interactive. The
sense of the broadened scope is captured in the
contemporary preference for the term ‘armed forces
and society’ with its more inclusive connotations, as
opposed to the more delimited ‘military sociology.’
Precisely because the study of armed forces and society
has become so overarching, it is convenient to present
the extant literature by discrete topical constructs: (a)
the professional soldier; (b) the combat soldier; (c) the
common soldier; (d) the citizen soldier; and (e) organ-
izational change.
1. The Professional Soldier
The basic referents for discussion of military pro-
fessionalism are to be found in two landmark studies
that first appeared in the interwar years between
Korea and Vietnam. Samuel P. Huntington, The
9873
Military Sociology
Soldier and the State (1957), and Morris Janowitz,
The Professional Soldier (1960), shared a common
perspective in that they eschewed negative stereotypes
of the military officer. This was in contrast to the
contemporaneous thesis of C. Wright Mills (1956)
characterizing military leaders as ‘warlords’ wielding
enormous influence in the ‘power elite.’
Huntington and Janowitz also agreed that the
complexities of modern warfare and international
polices required new formulation of military officer-
ship. They differed, however, in their conceptual and
programmatic portrayal of modern military profes-
sionalism. For Huntington, military efficiency and
political neutrality require a form of insulation from
the values of the larger and more liberal society.
Janowitz, on the other hand, proposes that military
professionalism should be responsive to, but not over-
whelmed by, external conditions such as managerial
skills, civilian educational influences, and emergent
social forces. Subsequent studies of the professional
officer have been strongly influenced by these con-
trasting ideal types.
A hardy perennial in the professional soldier litera-
ture has been the examination of the social origins of
career officers and socialization at military academies.
Research on this subject has been as notable in
European military sociology as in the USA. The
general conclusion is that professional self-definitions
are much more shaped by anticipatory and concurrent
socialization than by social background variables.
In the USA, media attention in 1999 was focused on
studies that presented evidence of a ‘civil-military
gap.’ The overall finding was one of a growing social
conservatism within the officer corps that was in-
creasingly alienated from the social values of the
larger society (Feaver and Kohn 1999). At the same
time, however, public opinion surveys reported that
the armed forces were accorded the highest evaluation
among US institutions.
If research on military professionalism in the USA,
Western Europe, and other advanced democracies was
becoming more notable in the contemporary period,
studies of military officers in other areas followed a
different pattern. During the 1970s the literature on
the military in Third World countries was quite
extensive, but has since declined. The literature on
military officers in underdeveloped areas was marked
by two quite opposing schools, one seeing the armed
forces as ‘moderinizers,’ the other as ‘praetorians.’
2. The Combat Soldier
Any discussion of the combat soldier must use as a
benchmark the surveys of World War II reported in
the volumes of The American Soldier by Samuel
Stouffer and his associates (1949 Vol. II). These studies
reveal a profoundly nonideological soldier. The key
explanation of combat motivation was seen as a
9874
function of the soldier’s solidarity and social cohesion
with fellow soldiers at small group levels. Shils and
Janowitz (1948) reported similar findings based on
interviews with German prisoners of war. The over-
riding salience of the primary group became an
accepted tenet of military sociology.
Moskos’ (1970) observations of US combat soldiers
in Vietnam, however, indicated that the concept of
primary groups had limitations. The combat soldier in
Vietnam had a more privatized view of the war
fostered by the one-year rotation system in contrast to
his World War II counterpart who was in the war for
the duration. Moskos’ Vietnam research, moreover,
found that although the US soldiers had a general
aversion to overt patriotic appeals, this should not
obscure underlying beliefs as to the war’s legitimacy,
or ‘latent ideology,’ as a factor affecting combat
performance and commitment.
The increasing use of armed forces in peacekeeping
missions starting in the 1990s has focused attention
on the contrast between soldiers as ‘warriors’ or
‘humanitarians.’ One the one hand, the conventional
wisdom is that ‘operations other than war’ undermine
combat effectiveness. Field research, however, indi-
cates that many soldiers themselves view peacekeeping
as conducive to overall military effectiveness (Miller
1997). In any event, the peacekeeping literature has
become another genre in military sociology, replacing
to a major extent the earlier interest on the combat
soldier. Much of this was anticipated by Janowitz’s
(1960) earlier formulation of the emerging ‘con-
stabulary’ role of the military.
3. The Common or Enlisted Soldier
The benchmark referent for any discussion of the
common or enlisted soldier (‘other ranks’ in British
terminology) is again the volumes of The American
Soldier (Stouffer et al. 1949, Vol. I). Never before or
since have so many aspects of military life been so
systematically studied. These materials largely re-
volved around the enlisted culture and race relations
as well as combat motivation. These issues continue to
interest military sociologists, with the more recent
topical additions of gender and sexual orientation. A
lacuna in the military sociology of enlisted personnel
has been the near absence of studies of sailors, airmen,
or marines.
The overriding finding of The American Soldier
(Stouffer et al. 1949, Vol II) was the pervasive
enlisted resentment toward the privileged status of
officers. The centrality of the enlisted–officer cleavage
was further corroborated by other sociologists, who
described the military from the vantage of active-duty
participation in World War II. Starting in the Cold
War period, another distinction in the military struc-
ture appeared. The college-educated draftee is de-
scribed as far more alienated from his enlisted peers of

lower socioeconomic background than he is from
officers with whom he shares a similar class back-
ground. In the Vietnam War, the most significant
cleavage was between single-term servicemen and
career servicemen, cutting across ranks (Moskos
1970). In the post-Cold War era, yet another cleavage
has appeared, that between soldiers serving in combat
units and those in support units.
One of the most celebrated findings of The American
Soldier was the discovery that the more contact white
soldiers had with black troops, the more favorable was
their reaction toward racial integration (Stouffer et al.
1949, Vol. II). Such social science findings were used to
buttress the arguments that led to the abolishment of
racial segregation in the armed forces. By the early
1950s this integration was an accomplished fact,
resulting in a far-reaching transformation of a major
US institution. Following ups and downs in race
relations during the 1960s and 1970s, the armed forces
by the 1990s were viewed as model for black leadership
in a racially integrated institution. One key finding,
however, was that blacks consistently take a more
negative view of race relations than do whites.
If race relations, relatively speaking, were positive in
the armed forces, the interactions between men and
women were viewed as more problematic. By the
1990s, the role of women had greatly expanded in the
US armed forces to the point where women were in
nearly all positions excepting direct ground combat.
Much public and media attention was focused on
recurrent scandals involving sexual harassment and
adultery in the military. Indeed, between 1995 and
2000 more books were written on gender than on any
other topic in the armed forces. One key finding is that
enlisted women and women officers were not in accord
on the role of females in the armed forces, the former
favoring a more limited role than the latter (Miller
1998).
4. The Citizen Soldier
A running theme in American military life has been the
juxtaposition of the professional soldier and the citizen
soldier. The notion of the citizen soldier raises the twin
issues of the extent to which military life affects civilian
sensibilities of noncareer soldiers and civilian input
affects the military system. Although topics such as
reserve forces and officer training programs on college
campuses are directly related to the concept of the
citizen soldier, these topics have not been objects of
major research by military sociologists.
The controversies over conscription during the
Vietnam War did relate conceptual issues and em-
pirical findings to the sociology of the citizen soldier.
Even with the end of the draft in 1973, sociological
interest in the citizen soldier remained strong (Segal
1989). The policy debate on the all-volunteer force and
military recruitment has largely become one between
sociologists and economists.
Military Sociology
5. Organizational Change
A major paradigm for understanding change in the
military organization is the institutional–occupation
thesis (Moskos and Wood 1988). Where an institution
is legitimated in terms of values and norms, an
occupation is based on the marketplace economy.
In an institution, role commitments tend to be
diffuse, reference groups are ‘vertical’ (i.e., within the
organization), and compensation is based on rank
and seniority. In an occupation, role commitments
tend to be specific, reference groups are ‘horizontal’
(i.e., with like workers external to the organization),
and compensation is based on skill level and labor
market considerations. An ideal type formulation, the
‘I\O’ thesis has served as a basis for much subsequent
research in Western military systems outside the USA.
The overarching thesis is that contemporary military
organizations are moving away from an institutional
format to one more resembling that of an occupational
one.
In the wake of the end of the Cold War, even more
momentous changes are occurring within armed forces
of Western societies. The modern military that
emerged in the nineteenth century was associated with
the rise of the nation-state. It was a conscripted mass
army, war-oriented in mission, masculine in makeup
and ethos, and sharply differentiated in structure and
culture from civilian society. The ‘postmodern’ mili-
tary, by contrast, loosens the ties with the nation-state,
becomes multipurpose in mission, and moves toward a
smaller volunteer force. It is increasingly androgynous
in makeup and ethos and has a greater permeability
with civilian society (Moskos et al. 2000).
At the turn of the new century, military sociology
has yet to find a significant niche within the academic
community. Yet military sociologists are increasingly
being noted by the media and policy makers.
See also: Cold War, The; Military and Disaster
Psychiatry; Military and Politics; Military History;
Military Psychology: United States; Police, Sociology
of; Professionalization\Professions in History; Pro-
fessions, Sociology of; Racial Relations; Violence:
Public; War: Anthropological Aspects; War, Socio-
logy of
Bibliography
Feaver P D, Kohn R H 1999 Project on the Gap Between the
Military and Ci
ilian Society. Triangle Institute for Security
Studies, Durham, NC
Huntington S P 1957 The Soldier and the State. Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Janowitz M 1960 The Professional Soldier. Free Press, Glencoe,
IL
Miller L L 1997 Do soldiers hate peacekeeping? Armed Forces
and Society 23: 415–50
Miller L L 1998 Feminism and the exclusion of army women
from combat. Gender Issues 16: 333–64
9875
Military Sociology
Mills C W 1956 The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, New
York
Moskos C C Jr 1970 The American Enlisted Man. Russell Sage
Foundation, New York
Moskos C C, Wood F R 1988 The Military More Than Just a
Job? 1st edn. Pergamon–Brassey’s International Defense
Publishers, Washington, DC
Moskos C C Williams J A Segal D R (eds.) 2000 The
Postmodern Military. Oxford University Press, New York
Segal D R 1989 Recruiting for Uncle Sam. University Press of
Kansas, Lawrence, IN
Shils E A, Janowitz M 1948 Cohesion and disintegration in the
wehrmacht in World War II. Public Opinion Quarterly
12: 280–315
Stouffer S A et al. 1949 The American Soldier. Vol. I: Adjustment
During Army Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Stouffer S A et al. 1949 The American Soldier. Vol. II: Combat
and its Aftermath. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
C. Moskos
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)
J. S. Mill’s main contributions to Social Science lay in
three areas, political economy, political philosophy,
and the philosophy of social science; the major works
identified with these three fields are: Principles of
Political Economy, On Utilitarianism, On Liberty,
Considerations on Representati
e Go
ernment, and his
Logic. Although educated in the intellectual environ-
ment of classical Utilitarianism associated with Jeremy
Bentham and Bentham’s collaborator, Mill’s father
James Mill, Mill is famous for his amendment to
utilitarianism strictly considered, particularly in his
essay On Liberty, a classic statement of political
liberalism. In many works he evinced a recognition of
the importance of historical process that was absent
from the aspiration to a deductive social science which
characterised the previous generation of utilitarians,
and the thinking of liberal political economists who
would claim his legacy. Mill’s iconic status as a liberal
has made his intellectual legacy a site of fierce
ideological contestation.
Born in London, on May 20, 1806, his precocious
education—famously described in the celebrated
Autobiography (1873)—deliberately prepared him for
a career as a social and political thinker and reformer.
Although commonly held to have inculcated him with
utilitarian principles, his early education was
grounded in the classics—his father started him with
Greek at age three—and was much wider than this,
wider, indeed, than that of most modern social
scientists. He spent a year in France in 1820–2 before
beginning a career in the Civil Service, following his
father’s footsteps at India House.
In his Autobiography he describes an emotional
crisis at age 20 which had important intellectual
9876
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
dimensions and was finally resolved only following the
death of his father in 1836. In the intervening period
Mill remained an active member of the Philosophical
Radicals—a largely extra-parliamentary grouping on
the more radical wing of those seeking reform of
parliament culminating in the 1832 Reform Act—but
his underlying philosophical position was undergoing
a radical reappraisal. This was first outlined in a series
of articles on ‘The Spirit of the Age’ in the periodical
The Examiner. Establishing some distance from his
father and his upbringing, he claimed, liberated his
thinking from Benthamite utilitarianism, and led him
to promote the ideal of self-cultivation (which his own
Autobiography sought to encourage). He was inspired
in the development of the imagination and emotions
by his relationship with Harriet Taylor, a married
woman whom he met and fell in love with in 1830. To
her he also credited considerable influence in the
intellectual development of his arguments. They were
married eventually in 1851, after her husband’s death.
Despite this awakening of feeling, Mill rejected intui-
tionism as a basis for philosophy and was committed
to extending the experiential methods of the natural
sciences to the social. The new dimensions in his
thinking did, however, stress the limitations of the
associationist psychology which had informed his own
upbringing, and introduced ideal-regarding criteria—
standards which look to the fulfilment of certain ideal
principles—into the predominantly consequentialist
character of his inherited utilitarianism. Furthermore
Mill increasingly recognised the thick historical tex-
ture required for an understanding and appraisal of
social and political institutions. Through his father’s
Scots education and his teacher Dugald Stewart, Mill
had access to the thinkers of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment—David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robert-
son, and Adam Ferguson—who had developed
sophisticated accounts of what would today be called
historical sociology, then termed philosophical his-
tory. Mill’s interest in this can be seen as early as his
essay Ci
ilisation (1836).
There were new influences which he also acknow-
ledged. These included that of S. T. Coleridge to
whom he devoted an essay with his concern to
institutionalize historically acquired learning and cul-
tivation in a national clerisy—a kind of secularized
church establishment; Alexis de Tocqueville, whose
two volumes of Democracy in America Mill reviewed
for the Westminster Re
iew in 1835 and 1840 and who
had a profound effect on his thinking about the need
to manage the political effects of the historical move-
ment to more democratic societies; and Auguste
Comte, whose sense of history as a process of rational
amelioration survived (frailly) in Mill, even after his
rejection of the more elitist policy implications which
Comte had drawn from it.
Impressed as Mill was by Tocqueville’s account of
local democracy in American townships, and seeing
democratic culture as the inevitable future for Euro-
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7