ABSTRACT
How have recruiters used modern methods of communication – media – to promote service in and allegiance towards armed forces and civil defence organisations? This question is more difficult to answer than one might at first suspect. There is great variety both in the number of communication channels utilised by recruiters and in the different uses to which such channels can be put. Newspapers, for example, can endorse service in articles, opinion pieces or editorials, but they can also host paid announcements – advertisements. Some media texts, furthermore, can be produced by recruiters, while others require special creative or technical expertise that only external agents possess. To complicate matters, scholars continue to debate the terminology used to define persuasive communications, a debate that this chapter will avoid because it opens up the semantic equivalent of a can of worms. What it will do, instead, is give a sense of the many devices and techniques utilised by recruiters during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a framework for conceptualising such promotional endeavours. It will also show how technological and institutional changes have expanded the means and methods of military recruitment during a very volatile period in human history.
