While noncommissioned officers (NCOs) are hailed as the “backbone” of the world’s armed forces, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to them compared with the officer corps. NCOs have ...been at the margins of social scientific literature, largely because of Huntington’s officer-centric concept of the military profession, which was based on a sharp division of roles and which excluded NCOs as well as reservists and soldiers. This article holds that the officer–NCO relationship is not a functional, timeless universal in military organizations and thus merits scholarly attention. The (re)introduction of NCO-style “Specialist Officers” in the Swedish Armed Forces is used to highlight how organizational and technological factors affect the division of labor between officers and NCOs and the text ends with a call for comparative research efforts on the category of NCOs.
This article argues that military organizations display a more rigorous form of collective sensemaking than ordinary bureaucratic organizations. Military organizing is predicated on the rigorous ...modes of thinking and acting that follow from the particular military propensity to impose order on chaos. This trait is antithetical to modern notions of “the learning organization,” in which exploring variety and experimenting and testing out unproven methods are central. We identify two sets of structural conditions that constitute the sociocognitive landscape of military organizations and discuss how the military logic of action might be enacted in different sociocultural contexts. Our framework is brought to bear on recent research on international military missions, and in the concluding section, we summarize our arguments and discuss their wider implications in terms of trade-offs between adaptability and other capabilities in the design of military forces.
Responding to Soeters and Talbot and Fischer, we clarify our position that learning in military organizations is highly contingent on established organizational frameworks, vocabularies, and ...understandings and constrained by existing power relations. The danger present in military operations increases the importance of minimizing internal frictions and constrains local experimentation and the application of different solutions. Thus, while there is learning in military organizations, the latter are less prone than large, civilian organizations to venture into the use of new and unproven solutions. The present debate about learning in military organization reflects the different basic assumptions about formal organizations in management studies as opposed to the field of organizational sociology.
Texten diskuterar vägval i det svenska systemet för grundläggande officersutbildning utifrån 1) jämföresler med andra länders motsvarnade system resp 2) tänkbara målkonflikter mellan samhälle, ...försvarsmakt respektive Försvarshögskolan bl a utifrån Janowitz begrepp överprofessionalisering.
The past decade has seen substantial shifts in Swedish security policy and major change in the domestic debate about NATO. For the first time, all of the right-of-centre "alliance parties" are ...calling for a full NATO membership, and popular support for NATO has increased. Yet public opinion contains ambiguities and paradoxes that complicate the picture. At the same time as support for NATO has increased, the public is overwhelmingly for continued military non-alignment. Drawing on previous research, longitudinal data from national surveys, and other sources on defence and security issues, this article aims to increase our understanding of the development and change in Swedish public opinion on NATO. A key argument is that Erving Goffman's theatre metaphor, combined with neo-institutional decoupling theory, to a large degree can help understand the public opinion paradox.
