Introduction

This chapter reframes the study of military organizations by centering on military professional practices—socio-material configurations of technology, roles, and shared meanings—rather than “war” as activity or infantry units as paradigm. Drawing on historical sociology, practice theory, and ethnographic approaches, it conceptualizes practices as spatially dispersed, temporally enduring, artificially constituted through selective role systems and codification, and intrinsically teleological. This chapter situates armed forces within the modern state’s legal-administrative order and its coercive authority over military bodies. It critiques extant research for privileging cohesion and discipline while neglecting technologically intensive, interdependent practices across army, navy, and air force, where hierarchical command routinely coexists with horizontal coordination. This chapter motivates an exploratory, comparative design that maps variation in material embedding, social structure, and meaning, outlines the book’s theoretical and methodological scaffolding, and previews empirical analyses of organizational ideology, styles of interaction, internal distinctions, materiality, and command—yielding a pluralized, practice-centric account of the military’s inner life.