Suchergebnisse

This article is based on a secondary analysis of post combat debriefing interviews conducted by the Department of Military Psychiatry, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, with 811 active duty U.S. Army service men and women who participated in Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, in December 1989. The data offer a unique and unprecedented perspective on the use of telecommunications, and this study sought to illustrate the use of telephones and television by the soldiers involved in the invasion and its aftermath. As was found in previous research, the telephone in combat proved to be primarily positive at the level of the soldier, although it did introduce new challenges for leaders. Television technology was both useful and a distraction for soldiers. Overall, one-way and real-time, two-way telecommunication devices have come to have an important impact on the experience of soldiers and their family members during war.

This article examines a forward-deployed US Army unit in Eastern Europe. Drawing from military sociology, the theoretical framework used to study this unit focused primarily on factors of boredom and the fragmentation model of organizational culture. The methodological approach was mixed, including interviews and participant and non-participant observations of the deployed soldiers and military civilians. The research explored unit members' perceptions about unit leadership, quality of life, communication with loved ones, the mission, work roles, interactions with the local foreign military and civilians, and unit diversity. The findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of the relationship between military boredom and fragmentation. Overall, we found some ambiguity regarding some parts of soldiers' lives—including an unclear understanding regarding the nature of the mission. The study also found low to moderate levels of boredom across five domains: underutilization, cultural deprivation, lack of privacy, isolation, and time and space reorientation. Although in most cases the level of boredom related to perceived ambiguity (less boredom usually meant less perceived ambiguity), in some cases an inverse relationship was identified. We conclude that future studies should determine whether our findings apply to newer forward-deployed contexts in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Sociology is often portrayed as an errant discipline, driving forward without any apparent direction or purpose. We contend that these perceptions about the central tenets of our discipline derive from a lack of standardization of core material, which reduces the social value of sociology as a scientific field and erodes its credibility as a discipline. Insofar as common conceptual knowledge exists in the field of sociology, one ought to find evidence of it in the introductory textbook. To this end, our study examines 35 introductory sociology textbooks published in the 1940s (n=16) and the 1990s (n=19) in search of common concepts that represent cumulative core disciplinary knowledge. While our findings reveal uniformity in the structure of the textbooks' major chapter headings within their respective decades, our analysis of concepts—the language used to introduce disciplinary content—reveals that the vast majority are referenced by only one text, with fewer than three percent of all concepts shared in common. Moreover, neither the number of concepts introduced only once nor the variability in the total number of concepts referenced declined across the two decades. In sum, while introductory sociology textbooks are structured in similar ways, we find little commonality in the concepts used by texts' authors to frame the discipline, either within the two cross-sections or between them.

pt. 1. War on the ground : combat and its aftermath -- pt. 2. War on the ground : non-combat operations, non-combatants, and operators -- pt. 3. The war back home : the social construction of war, its heroes, and its enemies -- pt. 4. The war back home : families and young people on the home front

This essay introduces a special issue of Armed Forces & Society examining sociology at military academies around the globe. Articles represent nine countries—Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United States. We begin with a brief history of sociology and the military and growth of military sociology as a subfield, followed by the development of military academies in general and sociology at military academies more specifically. The essay concludes with six trends found across the nine nations and ten academies—the stigma of sociology; the cannibalization of sociology courses; co-optation of sociological concepts; charismatic leadership; radical social change; and revitalization.

Sociology and the Sociology Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, are described. Grounded in the academy's mission of educating and inspiring future leaders of character, this article focuses on the history of the Sociology Program, alignment with American Sociological Association standards, sociodemographics of cadet sociology majors, recent graduates, the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and the sociology faculty and their productivity. The Sociology Program has made significant progress in multiple areas while concomitantly being handicapped in other areas. The conclusion addresses the significance of social science in military officer education.