Department of Sociology  2112 Art-Sociology Building
College Park, MD 20742  

The study of the relationship between armed forces and society in the University of Maryland Department of Sociology was introduced between the Korean and Vietnam wars by the late Professor Charles Coates, who joined the faculty in 1955. He established courses in Military Sociology and the Sociology of War. In collaboration with Roland J. Pellegrin he also wrote the first textbook in military sociology. Click here to read a biography authored by his son.

In the early 1970s, as America was re-evaluating the military role it had played in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, a number of new faculty members with interests in peace, war, and military organization were added to the department. In the mid-1970s, the major research focus of the program was the end of military conscription and the establishment of the all-volunteer military force. Through the 1980s, with the volunteer force well institutionalized, our focus shifted to the role that the U.S. military was beginning to adopt in peacekeeping operations, and to the increasingly timely and important issues of the ongoing process of gender integration in armed forces and of the work-family interface in the military context.

In the 1990s, concerns with the maintenance of a large standing force wer being replaced by a focus on the nature of armed forces in the post-Cold War world. In 1995, the Center for Research on Military Organizations was established as a center of excellence in military sociology. This Center serves as a locus for faculty and graduate student research. In the future, the processes of peacekeeping, gender integration, and work-family adaptation will remain central research concerns, and interest in the role of the military in Eastern Europe and the third world, asymmetric warfare, and in organizational down-sizing and base closings in the industrial nations, is likely to increase.