Sociology and Military Studies

Classical and Current Foundations

Joseph Soeters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351724265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

This book examines the connection between sociology and the challenges faced by the modern military.

Military sociology has received little attention in the broader academic world, and is mostly focused on civil-military relations. This book seeks to address this gap and combines ideas, theories and insights from sociology's founding authors, with each chapter focusing on a specific thinker. There are chapters on Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, Morris Janowitz, Norbert Elias, Cornelis Lammers, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Cynthia Enloe and Bruno Latour, and each essay discusses their ideas and theories in relation to topics that are of concern in and around the military today. Military studies are taken in a broad sense here, so the volume encompasses a wide range of issues, including civil-military relations, military-political affairs, performance and outcomes of military operations, and organizational arrangements including technology and the composition, performance and well-being of personnel. The book intends to provide views and insights that will help the military to innovate their organizations and practices, not necessarily in the usual functional way of innovating (i.e. faster, more precise, etc.) but in a broader way.

This book will be of great interest to students of sociology, military studies, civil-military relations, war and conflict studies, and IR in general.

1 Max Weber

Bureaucracy, leadership and military music

Max Weber (1864–1920) from Germany is one of the most famous names among sociology’s founding scholars, and his contributions to the discipline have been enormous. One only has to recall his work on the sociology of religion, culminating in his theory on the impact of the protestant ethic on the development of Western capitalism. But there were other studies on religions as well, on Judaism and on Islam in particular, which broadened his scope of comparison and theorizing. His approach of broad historical-sociological systemizing also stressed the relevance of the state for the monopolization of legitimate force upon a territory. Hence it stressed the importance of the military in the formation of states, an idea that has been elaborated in many later sociological studies (e.g. Tilly, 1992; Joas and Knöbl, 2013).

In general, Weber’s texts are rife with observations that pertain to the military. Weberian thinking on state formation led sociologist Randall Collins to predict the coming demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, a number of years before it actually happened. This prediction, based on the idea of overstretched borders leading to unmanageable logistical problems for the military, was met with severe disbelief and criticism by the international and military experts of the time (Collins, 1995). We will see throughout the present book that sociological insights and predictions often provoke irritation, disbelief and rejection. Sociology frequently provides a critical analysis of common sense, as it often points to the unexpected and the unintended (Portes, 2000), which can be quite irritating indeed.

Next to this macro-sociological work, Weber contributed fundamentally to methodological issues, such as the importance of sinnhaft Verstehen, trying to understand people’s actions instead of merely observing or counting them, as well as the development of the so-called Ideal Type, one of which is the Bureaucracy (e.g. Coser, 1977). It is here where our discussion about the relevance of Weber’s work to the study of the military institution starts. But it ends with a surprising topic: military music.

Bureaucracy

For organization studies, and for military studies in particular, Weber’s work on bureaucracy theory has been tremendously influential, and despite signals to the contrary (Lounsbury and Carberry, 2005), its impact can hardly be overestimated (e.g. Du Gay, 2000; Shields, 2003). Bureaucracy as an organized form of human action has developed over centuries, as far back as the Egyptian and Roman empires and before. It is a manifestation of the continuous rationalization of organized social life throughout history. It is also a vehicle to encapsulate ‘naked power’ – the potential to fully dominate others and make them do whatever you want, even against their own needs, wishes or well-being. The bureaucracy does so by well-described legal arrangements and organizational practices. Max Weber, in the early twentieth century, was the first to systematically analyse the bureaucracy’s elements and characteristics based on instrumental rationality and standardization.

Weber needed just a couple of pages to define the bureaucracy as an ideal type, i.e. as a theoretical construct in a pure form extracting the essentials of a phenomenon that perhaps are never present as such in reality (Gerth and Wright Mills, 2009: 196–204; Weber, 1976 [1914]: 124–130). This ideal type applies to both public and business bureaucracies. It stresses

• a firm, stable and elaborated division of labour and duties,

• hierarchically arranged positions,

• formal rules, regulations and work practices,

• fixed salaries and career patterns, and

• the appointing and promoting of civil servants on the basis of their educational qualifications and previous performance (merit).

Other particular characteristics, such as employees’ race, religion, family or geographical origin, are, or should be, irrelevant in hiring and promoting personnel. Additionally, workers are protected by law and regulations against external impact but also against the leaders they serve. There is equal treatment for all employees, and career paths are based on seniority, achievement or both. There is compulsory retirement, implying that all employees occupy organizational positions only for a limited period of time. Furthermore, there are no extra-organizational prerogatives related to the position that employees or their leaders (‘die Herren’) occupy. Employees are personally free and only need to be obedient to their leadership in relation to their bureaucratic obligations (e.g. Perrow, 1972: 4; Dandeker, 1990: 9). Finally, the employees do not own any of the resources that belong to the bureaucracy, implying that they cannot use the organization’s resources for their own purposes.

This stands in contrast to patrimonial or pre-bureaucratic organizations, where the servants are ‘at the disposal’ of the leader, and tasks, positions and remuneration, sometimes in kind, can change all the time depending on the insights and moods of the leader. Most importantly, the servants have acquired their positions based on their affiliations with the power elite, and not, or not so much, because of their professional qualifications and merits. Those affiliations may be regional, religious, political, tribal, family- or language-related, or combinations of those.

All this very much applies to military organizations. Western military organizations, in their various stages of development, may be characterized as bureaucracies par excellence: procedures, skills and drills are maximally elaborated, rationalized, standardized and hence impersonalized. In turn these are collectively transferred to the newly enlisted men and women whose salaries are related to objective criteria connected to qualification and merits. Similarly, promotion to higher ranks follows well-described patterns, implying that career paths are clear to everyone and are also based on qualification and merit.

Weber was among the first to point out the enormous impact of discipline as a source of military superiority, even exceeding the influence of technological innovation in the times before Weber’s era (Gerth and Wright Mills, 2009: 255–261). The disciplined behaviour of troops conducting their moves and actions precisely in accordance with the prescripts they had learned during exercises turned out to be a decisive factor on the battlefield. Greek and Roman forces in ancient history and later examples such as the Dutch army under Maurice of Orange or Chaka Zulu’s troops in Africa clearly evinced the weight of military discipline as a key element in military bureaucratic organizing. King’s (2013) interpretation of the ‘collective virtuosity’ of today’s combat infantry groups echoes this view.

In addition to discipline, skills and drills, legal considerations play an increasingly large role in operational decisions and conduct in military bureaucracies. In today’s military operations, the legal advisor is seen as the most important officer, next to the commander. Every operational decision can and will be evaluated and judged beforehand from a legal perspective, and also much later after the mission or operation has ended. The emphasis on law at the state level and regulations at the level of the organization itself is part and parcel of Weber’s concept of bureaucracy, which is not so surprising since he, like his father, enrolled as a student of law.

The bureaucratic organizational system has been refined over centuries. It aims to ensure predictability, rationality, calculability and protection against arbitrariness of those in power, particularly for the inmates of the organization but also for those affected by state conduct or, in the case of the military, state violence. The system has clear advantages. For instance, possible derailments of military people leading to violence getting out of control will be legally dealt with. Seen from this perspective, the ‘bureaucratic ethos’ cannot be praised enough (Du Gay, 2000). It also constitutes the foundation of what Ritzer (1993) has termed the ‘McDonaldization’ thesis, which relates to the ubiquitous presence of bureaucratic organizing in today’s societies. American sociologist Morten Ender used this idea when pondering whether American soldiers deployed to Iraq were ‘McSoldiers’ or innovative professionals. He concluded that American soldiers vacillated between being dependent McSoldiers ceaselessly repeating their learned skills and drills, and innovative actors making their own decisions more or less independently in a given situation (Ender, 2009: 153).

This conclusion already indicates that obedience has its disadvantages. Following the bureaucracy’s prescriptions is not always good as there may be far reaching negative consequences. Bauman (1989) contended that the Holocaust – with its elaborated chains of intelligence, administrative, transport and other logistic organizations and finally the militarily-organized death camps – could never have occurred without the ‘logic’ of rational, bureaucratic organizing (see also Soeters, 2005). Every person, every unit, every organization, within the machinery or supplying the machinery, knew what to do and did so. While acting in this manner they usually were not fully aware of, or did not feel responsible for, their contribution to the final result: the genocide of millions of people.

The transporting of about 100,000 Dutch Jewish citizens from various cities to the Nazi death camps in World War II was possible through the assistance of many. First, there was the help given by Dutch city clerks who provided the names and addresses, then there were the Dutch city police (next to Nazi police and activists) who summoned these citizens to leave their houses. Next, there was the Dutch railway organization that provided the transport to the country’s two transition camps that were built by ordinary construction companies and supplied by local bakeries, grocery stores and farmers. Everyone did their bit, but no one was, or felt responsible for what would happen later on, further away in Germany and Poland. This interpretation is not uncontested but it undoubtedly points at the possible ‘irrationality of bureaucratic rationality’.

This interpretation, however, does not only seem relevant to an understanding of the Holocaust. In today’s world, it may help to come to grips with questions pertaining to the responsibility for the use of high-technology devices in violent conflicts, devices such as drones or robots. Many top-level individuals are involved in the use of such devices: suppliers, meteorologists, maintenance engineers, target planners, intelligence officers, commanders and operators. Given the elaborated division of labour, each person is responsible for only one (small) aspect of the whole operational machinery. Yet, who will be accountable if a drone misses its goal and causes tens or hundreds of innocent people to lose their lives?

This question fits into a more general development occurring inside the military, which is the increasing elaboration, regulation and standardization of war-fighting and combat (King, 2013). We will encounter this phenomenon more often throughout this book. For now, it suffices to point at this development that Malešević (2010: 221) has described as the ‘cumulative bureaucratization of coercion’. As said, this development implies one giant question: if everyone simply follows the rules and instructions, and if everyone practises the skills and drills that they were ceaselessly trained in, who is responsible for possible mishaps? Who is responsible for the actions of over-bureaucratized military organizations?

On the other side of the continuum (see Figure 1.1), current non-Western armed forces such as in many African nations or Afghanistan are often seen as patrimonial or pre-bureaucratic organizations. Such military organizations are under-bureaucratized so to speak, because they are based on particularistic and nepotistic staffing of various kinds. Tribal, ethnic, religious or political affinities are more important in decisions regarding hiring men than mere skills and competences. One can argue that in such armed forces politics trumps rational organizing. To be hired because you belong to the leader’s group is more important than merely knowing your job. The workforce composition in such armed forces creates (extreme) loyalty to the ruling power elite. In Perrow’s words (1972: 15): ‘In most cases, the exchange of loyalty for competence is in the executive’s interest.’

Figure 1.1 Continuum of bureaucratic organizing and violence

In such forces the lack of formal and legal recruitment and appraisal procedures, as well as the absence of clear career prospects and fixed payments, are likely to be detrimental to military performance, at least in Western eyes (e.g. Davids and Soeters, 2009; Erikson Baaz and Verweijen, 2013). Talmadge (2015) has provided an enormous contribution in this connection.

She convincingly showed that armed forces whose workforce is primarily directed at preventing coups from inside and protecting the regime in power are much less effective on the battlefield than those whose composition and staffing is based on military professional criteria, i.e. qualification and merit, only. She made two comparisons: the North Vietnamese with the South Vietnamese army and the armed forces of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq with those of Iran. Basing her analysis on these comparisons, she concluded that the defeat of the South Vietnamese army, despite massive US support, was the consequence of failing conventional war practices because inner-directed coup protection practices had been dominant in the organization. The Vietcong on the contrary did not have to face the risks of coups and had adopted conventional war practices far more successfully. As to the Iraq–Iran comparison it turned out that both armed forces performed poorly when their militaries were uniformly subject to coup protection practices; in times when those practices were not in place, however, military performance had been noticeably better (Talmadge, 2015: 8–11). Haddad and colleagues’ work (2015) on the militaries in Arab countries similarly points to the divergent outcomes of military interventions, in this case with respect to the protest movements during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. The armed forces in Arab nations pledged allegiance either to the state or to the ruling regime, which denotes the difference between the bureaucratic and the patrimonial or pre-bureaucratic military.

A major additional problem with pre-bureaucratic militaries whose personnel is hired because of affiliations with the power elite is that they tend to take sides in internal conflicts against the groups that oppose the power elite. This so-called ‘civil service issue’ is almost always a factor in the origin and perpetuation of civil wars. In such cases the military becomes part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Examples abound: the pro-British composition of security forces in Northern Ireland aggravated the troubles between the adversary population groups; police forces in India, with its large majority of non-Muslims, have often been criticized for harassing and victimizing Muslim citizens; the security forces in former Yugoslavia were dominated by Serbs; and officers of European descent ordered indigenous conscript soldiers in Bolivia to shoot at protesters on the streets who were also predominantly indigenous. More recently, in Iraq, the religiously biased staffing of the Iraqi armed forces after the Americans had left the country spawned the flaring up of hostilities there. In the various African conflicts, this problem emerges and re-emerges ceaselessly. Again and again, it is the civil service issue that highlights grievances (Horowitz, 1985; Soeters, 2005: 24–26).

These distinctions are not a matter of black and white, of course, and they are also in constant flux. Besides, there has been quite some criticism of the Western bureaucracy (e.g. Crozier, 1964; Perrow, 1972; Masuch, 1985). Too strict regulations (‘red tape’), coercive leadership, ritualism, ‘trained incapacity’, over-conformity, goal displacement and too little information-sharing within the organization, vertically and horizontally, may be consequences of elaborated bureaucratic organizing. These hamper the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Max Weber: Bureaucracy, leadership and military music
• 2. Emile Durkheim: The military group, culture and its consequences
• 3. Karl Marx: Critical analyses of society and the military
• 4. Georg Simmel: Networks, conflict, secrecy and the stranger
• 5. Jane Addams: From peace activism to pragmatic peacekeeping
• 6. W. E. B. Du Bois: Race, diversity and inclusion, in society and the military
• 7. Erving Goffman: Total institutions, interaction rituals, street-level bureaucrats
• 8. Michel Foucault: Discipline and surveillance in and by the military
• 9. Morris Janowitz: The professional soldier, civil–military relations and the AVF
• 10. Norbert Elias: Decline of violence, habitus in combat, international relations
• 11. Cornelis Lammers: Strikes and mutinies, occupational styles, and cooperation
• 12. Arlie Russell Hochschild: Emotions in organizations and in the military
• 13. Cynthia Enloe: Feminist views of the military and its surroundings
• 14. Bruno Latour: Science and technology in society and the military
• 15. From the classics to the future in military studies: Conclusions, themes and prospects
• Index