Morale

The book charts the institutional, cultural, and political history of morale in modern imperial Britain. First emerging in the nineteenth century as a residual problem in military disciplinary discussions, morale gradually emerged as a central problem in the management of groups, and, during the twentieth century, was diffused to other, civilian spheres of life. By the era of the Second World War, morale had become a ubiquitous and truly British concept. Its management was seen as vital for securing victory in war and, later on, as central to the goals of industrial management in a democratic age. In its name, Britons have generated a host of institutional practices to promote and observe morale, and it served as an important organizing principle for a host of social-psychological and managerial knowledge. Throughout the book, morale is examined both as a disciplinary technology to maximize productivity or collective capacity, and as encompassing a broader political vision for the management of society. Military theorists who feared the prospect of imperial decline, industrial psychologists who lamented the prevalence of social alienation, promoters of the British welfare state who insisted on the relationship between morale, sacrifice, and postwar reconstruction, all articulated their endeavor as a quest for a social emollient, seemingly lost in a disintegrated modern civil society. Morale ends with the transformations in the understanding of morale and the political visions to which it has been linked, against the backdrop of the crumbling of the social-democratic state and the ascendancy of the New Right.