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This next article is:
Ouchi, William G. (1979, Sept.). A conceptual framework for the design of organizational control mechanisms. Management Science, 25(9), 833-848.
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"This paper considers a more simple-minded view of organizational control stated in the following two questions: What are the mechanisms through which an organization can be managed so that it moves towards its objectives? How can the design of these mechanisms be improved, and what are the limits of each basic design?" (p. 833)
This seems straightforward enough. First, however, one needs to identify the objectives, I think, because that will make a difference in what kinds of controls to choose, right?
The objective of the mission basically, was to equip indigenous church leaders in Eastern Europe.
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I'm skipping over market and bureaucratic mechanisms, because they don't provide anything helpful (in trying to understand the Vienna mission.
"Consider the foreman in the warehouse. His task is to oversee the work of pickers and packers. How is the warehouse manager to evaluate the work of the foreman? To some extent, he can rely on bureaucratic mechanisms such as output schedules, budgets, and inventory rules, but these in turn require surveillance. Given that the task of the foreman is significantly more subtle than that of the picker, the manager's task of bureaucratically supervising the foreman becomes very complex. However, if the manager is capable of selecting for promotion to foreman only that subset of workers who display a high internal commitment to these objectives, then his need for explicit surveillance and evaluation is reduced. In short, once the manager knows that they are trying to achieve the 'right' objectives, he can eliminate many costly forms of auditing and surveillance." (p. 836-7)
It might take a bit more by way of mental gymnastics to apply this to the Vienna mission context. But, since this text seems to start with the difficulties of oversight, I'll take that approach too. What would the difficulties of oversight have been for the Vienna mission?
Per me: I don't think I would have been that difficult to "oversee" in the usual sense of the term because it should be readily recognizable if I was filing everything wrong or making a lot of typos in my letters, for example. So from that standpoint a bureaucratic control of me should have sufficed. But the thing is that you have to add in the security issue.
Since the security issue was organization-wide (albeit with different positions have their own peculiar nuances), I'm going to consider the security issue in general.
How could the mission realistically make sure that its workers were complying with the security expectations (written and otherwise, spoken and otherwise)? One possibility would be to post cameras all over the building and having the evil military chaplain h.r. director (or his assistant) sit all day and watch the cameras. However, you might also want to get audio recordings, so there should be bugs in all the rooms and phones too, which would keep the evil h.r. director busy all day (unless he hadn't delegated camera duty to his assistant, in which case the assistant would monitor the bugs).
But then you still would have the issue of what happens when people leave the office. One possibility would be to just not let them leave the office, but keep them safely tucked away under close surveillance. And I suspect the theologians on staff would not have been sufficiently developed to mind these precautions at all, but would have just readily complied for the sake of security, which everyone knew was of utmost importance.
But the Austrian authorities might get suspicious if no one ever came out of the building, and then you have to deal with the schnitzel delivery guy... And heaven forbid someone from the States might come visiting.
No, so even if the theologians would have been okay with this set up, I have a sneaky suspicion it would have been problematic at some point in the process.
Another alternative would be to take a cue from the Soviets. They had something called an informant system in place, and this was so to one degree or another in all the Warsaw Pact countries. In this set up, what you would do is just recruit a few members of the organization to be snitches. And since no one would know who the snitches were, they'd be careful around any other staff members. And the organization could have a policy of everyone having to do everything with another staff member (maybe this is why the practice got started of women not being able to go to the restroom alone in public places - if you're not aware of this American custom it's just that women always go in droves to the restroom, such as at a restaurant).
The problem with this is that it would foster a climate of distrust, and the mission wouldn't go for that because it would make it hard to work together. Also, if anyone figured out who the snitches were they might find a way to do things in groups with no snitches amongst them. These are theologians, after all, and they're sometimes clever. You never know.
No, this text, I think provides about the only way possible to control the workers in the Vienna mission. But the thing is, as far as I'm concerned, just how much controlling should be done? How likely is it that people who have studied for their profession and then spent a year or more to raise support all just to work with the mission would become a traitor and betray the organization? And who would they betray the mission to, anyway? Their whole work was with believers in Communist countries, some of whom paid a heavy price for their faith - would the workers then go tell the Communists about the organization? I hardly think so!
But then there's the issue of Vienna being the hotbed of spies it was. So let's say that someone might accidentally tell a spy something about the mission. Does that mean that everyone should stay cloistered in their homes after work? Or maybe just hang out among themselves or maybe just with native English speakers?
The point is, how far are you going to take this? I've already written at some length about how the mission shouldn't have been so paranoid anyway and forsaken Scriptural teaching for the sake of security. But I wouldn't necessarily say they couldn't have any security precautions at all. I would say they should have rational security kept in perspective. That is, it shouldn't be an obsession and there should be more living by faith. Face it, no one can control everything in their lives. Like, I could go out and get hit by a car tomorrow. Or you could. Right?
Also, besides the Scriptural reasons, and besides the psychological ones (i.e., paranoia), I think there's also a justice issue. That is the mission shouldn't have had the right to treat it's own members the way they did just for the sake of security. In their system, where you had to just trust them on very limited knowledge, without questioning, and go along with everything. In that kind of a set up the individual is just an object, a thing that is controlled and acted upon but has no self-determination.
Anyway, let's go on.
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This next section is mainly of interest in helping to understand the different social entities involved:
"When these socialization processes characterize groups such as physicians or nurses who occupy different organizations but with similar values, we refer to them as professions. When the socialization process refers to all of the citizens of a political unit, we refer to it as a culture. When it refers to the properties of a unique organization, we may refer to it as a clan. The functions of socialization are similar in professions, cultures, and clans, but our present interest centers on the clan." (p. 837)
Like I say, this text mainly is helpful for defining the differences between socialization in professions, cultures, or organizations.
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"It is possible to arrange the three modes of control along each of two dimensions: the informational requirements necessary to operate each control type, and the social underpinnings necessary to operate each control type." (p. 837)I'll just sum up the table.
Market control requires information about prices, and the social requirements are the norms of reciprocity.
Bureaucracy control requires information about prices and rules, and the social requirements are norm of reciprocity and legitimate authority.
Clan control requires information about prices, rules and traditions, and the social requirements are norm reciprocity, legitimate authority, and shared values and beliefs.
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"A Clan requires not only a norm of reciprocity and the idea of legitimate authority (often of the 'traditional' rather than the 'rational/legal' form), but also social agreement on a broad range of values and beliefs. Because the clan lacks the explicit price mechanism of the market and the explicit rules of the bureaucracy, it relies for its control upon a deep level of common agreement between members on what constitutes proper behavior, and it requires a high level of commitment on the part of each individual to those socially prescribed behaviors. Clearly, a clan is more demanding than either a market or a bureaucracy in terms of the social agreements which are prerequisite to its successful operation." (p. 838)The thing that I've been stumped on is how the mission could get its members to agree on all the things it demanded from them? Of course, I haven't definitively shown that everyone had the same rules to live by as me, but assuming they did, and I never did anything against the mission but that still wasn't enough, what were they willing to agree with the mission on that evidently went beyond what I was doing? (or else, if I didn't get the treatment I did because of my own actions, then why did I get the treatment I did by the mission?)
It seems to me, too, that there could be a wide range of understanding as to what the "norm of reciprocity", "legitimate authority" and "shared values, beliefs" entail. For example, does reciprocity only encompass my at-work activities? If not, then what else does it include? Likewise, what type authority are we talking about and what is it authority over? Are we talking dictatorial authority? Are we talking dictatorial authority over my whole life? Then there's the issues of shared values, beliefs. What are these beliefs about and how all-encompassing are they? Maybe you can guess, if you've been following along at all, that the Vienna mission apparently took as much liberty as was possible in these "social requirements".
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I've got this article all marked up and we've only just begun, but it's late and so I'm going to leave off for now.
