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When I looked over the rest of that last text I realized there wasn't anything else I wanted to comment on, so I'm starting in on a new one now. This one is also a book chapter, but not of an edited book.
Moorhead, G., & Griffin, R. W. (1989). Organizational Behavior, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Chapter 16: Organizational Culture, p. 491-521.
There are several texts on organizational culture, so this is just the first of them.
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The first section of this chapter is: "The Nature of Organizational Culture."
The sub-section is: "What is Organizational Culture?"
"A surprising aspect of the recent rise in interest in organizational culture is that the concept, unlike virtually any other concept in the field of organizational behavior, has no single widely accepted definition...In the case of the Vienna mission one would expect the values defining its culture to at least bear a resemblance to Scriptural mandate. However, my experience of it would argue against this having been the case, as I've said in many ways over the course of blog. I've shown how security concerns preempted Scripture, how deception was a sine qua non aspect of the organization, and how the mission treated its members in seemingly unChrist-like ways. My contention is that Scripture served essentially as a kind of facade behind which it functioned more like a spy agency than Christian mission, and its values mirrored those you'd expect to find in a front organization.
Despite the apparent diversity of these definitions, a few common attributes emerge. First, virtually all the definitions refer to some set of values held by individuals in a firm. The values define what is good or acceptable behavior and what is bad or unacceptable behavior." (p. 493)
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"A second attribute common to many of the definitions in Table 16.1 is that the values that make up an organization's culture are often taken for granted. That is, rather than being written down in a book or made explicit in a training program, they are basic assumptions made by employees of the firm. It may be as difficult for an organization to articulate these basic assumptions as it is for people to articulate their personal beliefs and values. Several authors have argued that organizational culture is a powerful influence on individuals in firms precisely because it is not explicit but rather becomes an implicit part of employees' values and beliefs." (p. 495)I'm here to help the mission make explicit some of its implicit values, for which I expect to be thanked with rotten eggs. However, in the case of the mission, it is my contention that the mission leadership is actually quite aware of its values and intentionally tries to surreptitiously indoctrinate the newbie into its values through careful guidance and example, as well as socialization. The mission does this surreptitiously because it doesn't want those not very committed to the mission and its ways to realize consciously what is happening and how it actually operates. Once the mission is sure that the person is reliable, however, it might possibly let more of the organizational value structure become consciously known to a member.
At any step along the way the mission has carefully designed explanations and excuses for anything that might become known by an untrustworthy party. Sort of like my being sent back to the States for "culture shock," rather than the truth which was I was experiencing "reality shock" (i.e., mission-induced, not because of anything in the Austrian context) and the purpose was to get me to toe the line. The mission has lots of these slight of hand tricks up its sleeve to wheedle its way out of potentially discomfiting situations.
Meanwhile, I suspect that the vast majority of the theologians on staff, not to mention the other less educated staff, have not stepped back and tried to understand the mission's culture and if they did they'd probably be hit by too many blind spots because of their already having become part of the organization and having taken on its values and logic. I had the benefit of not having taken them on, but on the other hand my not ever having become a true insider meant there was a lot I did not know about the organization.
Also, I will just make another passing comment about values not "being written down in a book or made explicit in a training program." I've already discussed elsewhere how the mission followed the Soviet Union's legal nihilism example, so having something written down might not have meant a whole lot anyway, except to serve as a cover, like the Soviet Union's assertion that believers had the constitutional right to practice their faith (ignoring the fact, however, that only atheists had the constitutional right to propagate their views). Believers in the Soviet Union had about as much right to practice their faith as I had to study German upon my arrival in Austria (which right I was guaranteed in the organizational policy manual).
As to the "made explicit in a training program" issue, it's possible, I think that sometimes values might have been passed on forthrightly, probably mostly in a mentoring type situation or in one-on-one conversations with a more enlightened member. However, I think that more often it would be specific behavioral expectations that would be passed on like this, leaving the values awareness to be figured out by the individual, if s/he were so inclined to figure such things out. For example, over time the new recruit my learn that behaviors A, B and C were expected of him/her, leading to the possible conclusion that the mission valued x. The thing in the Vienna mission was that so much happened intentionally for security reasons that it's likely that someone in the heart of the mission not only understood the values but intended for the mission to have those values, perhaps in a social engineering way.
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"The final attribute shared by many of the definitions... is an emphasis on the symbolic means through which the values in an organization's culture are communicated." (p. 496)The mission did have stories and rituals. When these symbolic aspects of the culture received official sanction from the leadership these things became part of the accepted lore of the organization, which occasionally got passed down or repeated from time to time. Oral narrations of heroics in group settings often became fodder for prayer letters, and the knowledge that these stories presented a side of the mission that it wanted the outside world to see encouraged that process. In contrast, other seemingly benign stories might not make it through the prayer letter censoring process. Or, in my case, a not so benign but true story was intentionally suppressed by the mission.
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"We can use the three common attributes of definitions of culture just discussed to develop a definition with which most authors could probably agree: Organizational culture is the set of values, often taken for granted, that help people in an organization understand which actions are considered acceptable and which are considered unacceptable. Often, these values are communicated through stories and other symbolic means." (p. 497)If I am to understand correctly the mission's censoring my prayer letter in which I explained my return to the U.S. only a few months after being in Vienna, it would seem to be telling me that the mission's values were that it could do anything at all to make a member toe the line and that the member had absolutely no recourse nor right to even let others know what was really happening, let alone expect any rectification. That, at least in part, is how the mission viewed itself, it's member missionaries and security. At least that's how I read the unspoken values exhibited in that act of censorship. So it's no wonder there were no whistle blowers.
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I finished my stimulator so I'm going to wrap up here and do some other things.
