The Military’s Organization of Work: Producing Class Conflict over Collective Action among Military Family Communities

• In Event: 2357 - Sociology of Work and the Workplace

Abstract

Due to the enormous constraints the U.S. military places on military personnel, civilian military wives often sacrifice their careers or education in order to support their husbands’ careers in the military. Trapped within the gendered division of labor, wives perform the brunt of domestic labor and care work in their families and households, alleviating military personnel of these responsibilities. Considering frameworks of social class and nationalism, this paper examines how conflict between wives, rather than resistance to unequal relations of power, is produced and operates within the military family community. I contend that this conflict is created by the military’s organization of work and institutional culture that structures the military family community. I focus specifically on the military’s rank structure, a militarized social class system, and the “dependapotamus” label, a militarized version of the “welfare queen”, as two examples through which to explore the production and enactment of conflict, which I contend individualizes and obstructs forms of resistance. Using Michael Burawoy’s (1979) concepts of hierarchical and lateral conflict in the workplace, I show how conflict that one would expect to develop between military wives and the military, due to the great institutional pressures placed upon military wives’, becomes redirected into lateral conflict where wives fight amongst themselves. This paper argues that these community fractures come at a cost, because class conflict impedes the development of collective action against institutional relations of power. As a result, the military is able to maintain a degree of control over military wives in order to procure their labor in the home and military family community to support it’s own operational and institutional goals.

Author

• William James Oliver, Syracuse University