Job Satisfaction in the U.S. Army: 1943 and 1973
Abstract
This paper is concerned with two related questons: whether junior enlisted mens's perceptions of the nature of their service has changed with the end of conscription and the advent of the all-volunteer force; and the level of satisfaction of junior personnel in the all-volunteer force with the nature of their service relative to that of their conscription-era counterparts. The first of these issues is based upon Moskos' (1977) hypothesis that military service has been transformed from a calling, legitimized in terms of institutionalized values; to an occupation, legitimized in terms of the market place. If Moskos is correct, then the notion of job satisfaction is relevant to the study of modern military service, which is seen as increasingly similar to civilian employment, but is less relevant to the study of the conscription-era soldier, whose service was seen as something very differrent from civilian employment. However, it is notable that Stouffer and his colleagues (1949), in their research on the conscription-based Army of World War II, did regard satisfaction as an important attitude dimension, and research on noncombat troops in World War II has suggested that we perhaps have a romanticized notion of the nature of military service in that conflict (e.g., Rundell, 1978), based upon the media image of the combat infantryman. The second issue assumes that Moskos is correct, at least in his analysis of the all-volunteer force, and that if the Army is to be sustained without a military draft, job satisfaction will be one of the dimensions explaining the Army's success (or failure) in the accession and retention of high quality personnel.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1979
- Accession Number
- ADA077853
Entities
People
- David R. Segal
- Robert C. Kramer
Organizations
- U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences