An original model is presented for describing, analysing, and predicting soldiers’ behaviour in current regular combat arms units in the British Army. It was derived, using social anthropological techniques, during participant observation by a serving British Army officer, and provides more coherent insights than other models of unit life. Its central principle, created for this study, is a plurality of >social structures’. These >social structures’ are separate bodies of ideas, rules and conventions of behaviour which inform groups of people or individuals how to organise and conduct themselves vis-à-vis each other. One >social structure’ operates at any single moment, according to context. Such an approach has not previously been applied to British Soldiers. The model’s top level (low resolution), comprises: the formal command structure, consisting in the unit organisation, the apparatus of rank and discipline, and the framework of official accountability; the informal structure, comprising the conventions of behaviour in the absence of formal constraints; the functional structure, concerning >soldierly’ activity, attitudes, and expectations; and the loyalty/identity structure, encompassing the conventions involved in embracing and expressing membership of the formal hierarchy of groups within and above the unit. Lower levels provide higher resolution, including a typology of informal relationships which encompasses different degrees of closeness and differences or equality in rank. The model’s rigour is established by testing its sensitivity at high resolution to the different conditions of life in historical British armies. The top level, however, and the typology of informal relationships, are found potentially to provide a unifying framework for historical analysis of unit life in the British Army throughout its history. The model’s ability to illuminate current issues in the Army is demonstrated by its application to leadership training for officer cadets and the integration of women into regular combat arms units.

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At the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, Britain had only one military academy which taught Military History, the subject was overlooked at universities, few historians wrote on the topic and the government had not yet sanctioned the writing of official history. Yet, by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the situation was radically different. Not only had Military History come to play an important role in army education, there were several universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, which taught the subject, while the Committee of Imperial Defence had created a ‘Historical Section’ dedicated to the writing of officially authorised histories. Despite this dramatic transformation, the development of British Military History during this period has hitherto not been considered by scholars as a subject worthy of serious investigation. The meagre research which has been conducted on the subject has been limited in terms of its scope and use of primary sources. This thesis will attempt to fill this gap in the historiography by analysing the emergence, expansion and diversification of British Military History between 1854 and 1914. It will examine the different factors which led to the expansion of Military History: the need for improved military education, the requirement to collate information on recent wars, commercial opportunism, the desire to influence public perceptions and the discovery of Military History as a subject worthy of historical research.

The issue of how governments attract men and women to the armed forces has been a principal concern of historians of propaganda since Harold Lasswell first wrote on the subject in the 1920s. Yet while a great deal has been written about propaganda texts – posters, films, newsreels, radio broadcasts, television programmes, and so on – less attention has been paid to the ways in which these texts were produced and their place within the broader context of 20th century British history. Through an analysis of key institutions and individuals, and drawing on a range of primary and secondary source material, this thesis makes a case for a history of recruitment advertising rooted in the experiences and perspectives of its practitioners. Exploring a number of recruitment campaigns waged in Britain between 1913 and 1963, it studies the business of recruitment not through the medium of individual advertisements, but via the organisations, ideologies and discursive practices that constructed them. Following Liz McFall and Anne Cronin, who argue that advertising can be understood only in relation to the particular historical circumstances that give rise to it, and that advertising is at any one point the sum of the discourses that embody and maintain it, it explores how recruitment campaigns were organised, planned and executed at key moments in British history. Crucial to this approach is an analysis of archival records such as memoranda, minutes of meetings, production logs, memoirs and reports. By examining these records discursively, this thesis encourages a shift from textual readings of recruitment advertising to studies of how relevant organisations and individuals defined and understood recruitment practices as promotional devices intended to exhort and persuade. By examining military advertising through six case studies spanning the wartime, interwar and postwar periods, it explores how ideas about promotion shifted from one era to the next.

This thesis is a critical examination of the UK defence discourse. It is an exploration of the dominant explanation of defence in the UK in 2015, as evidenced by the artefacts of the discourse - most importantly, by the voices of those within the community. In doing so, this thesis seeks to challenge the notion that there is only one right way to manage and judge the notion of defence, highlighting the cultural and contextual dependence of such ideas, and the dangers which arise from it. In asking the simple question what is defence? I have aimed at identifying the references and experiences, through the deployment of an ethnographic approach, which are drawn on to construct the dominant understanding. In doing so, I have sought to distinguish that which is considered legitimate by the dominant managerial narrative and in what contexts. My findings are illustrated in the form of a power structure within which language and symbolism, and their influence on practice, together build the defence community's expression of identity. The predominance of managerialism in today's explanation of defence in the UK and the failings I have identified as a result, are perceivable throughout the UK public sector. Therefore, the restrictive nature of the narrative in excluding creativity and innovation in the defence sector, also has implications for wider public sector reform in the UK and abroad. The primary contribution this thesis makes rests in the application of the ethnographic approach and a post-structuralist three-pillared framework to a discipline which has traditionally been analysed from an organisational or political perspective. The hope is that, in applying this same approach in multiple contexts, a greater understanding of the mechanisms sustaining dominant explanations can be gained, as well as of the importance of legitimised spaces for innovation and creativity in reform processes.