This book analyzes military professional practices with respect to differences in their social structure, material embedding, and cultural patterns.

The volume offers a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the military institutional and organizational landscape, highlighting variation, heterogeneity and diverging beliefs in military organization, in contrast to the traditional image of a monolithic, unitary and authoritarian institution. In particular, the volume provides a widened empirical focus beyond infantry units to include the air force and navy. The overall conclusion of the book is that military organizations are a lot more variegated and internally differentiated than their public image implies and what previous research has suggested.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, defence studies and International Relations.

Chapters 1 and 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.