I've been going through everything trying to find my books on the other topic I want to discuss. A lot of my books are still in boxes, because I'm reticent to go through all the effort of putting the wall shelves up and unpacking them until I know how long I might be staying here. So I went through all the boxes in one place last night and now I just went through all the others that are in another place and I couldn't find a single one of those books. I've gone through the books on my stand-alone book shelves and they're not there. So I'm at a loss, and can't think of what else to do be look through the first batch of boxes again. I've found a lot of other books that might at some point be useful, but I really wanted to do that one subject. Well, that might just have to wait, I guess.
Anyway, let's return to the text. That last section was a real doozie.
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We're starting on the third major section of the article now: "The Organizational Setting: Segments and Boundaries."
"Schein (1971a) has developed a model of the organization that provides a quite useful description of an organizationally defined role in terms of three dimensions that are discernible empirically. The first dimension is a functional one and refers to the various tasks performed by members of an organization." (p. 218)
Here is a brief summary of my various functions within the organization: 1) secretary to Vienna asst. director (5 mos.); 2) leave of absence (1-2 mos.); 3) receptionist (USA, ca. 1 mo.); 4) secretary to USA director (covering for regular secretary on maternity leave; ca. 2 mos.); 5) secretary to Vienna asst. director (ca. 9 mos.); 6) receptionist (ca. 4 mos.).
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"The second dimension identified by Schein concerns the hierarchical distribution of rank within an organization. This is essentially a matter of who, on paper, is responsible for the actions of whom. It reflects the official lines of supervisory authority within an organization." (p. 219)
I was never responsible for anyone, on paper or otherwise, so the only way it would be relevant for me is regarding who was responsible for me (the sequence follows the above one):
1) Asst. director, Vienna; 2) North American director of my sending mission; 3) Director, USA; 4) Director, USA; 5) Asst. director, Vienna; 6) Director of H.R.
As such, I was always low on the hierarchy and the 2 receptionist positions were particularly low in it. Also, the move to the USA was a step away from where I should have been, and so it was a step downward.
The channels of answering to different people (or being answered to) did correspond well to what was on paper. However, other people in the department or in otherwise nearby positions might have differing levels of influence on me, such as regarding social control.
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"The third dimension in Schein's model is the most difficult to conceptualize and concerns the social fabric or interpersonal domain of organizational life. This is fundamentally an interactional dimension and refers to a person's inclusion within the organization. It can be depicted as if it were a radial dimension extending from the membership edge of a slice of organizational members in toward the middle of the functional circle. As Figure 3 indicates, movement along this dimension implies that a member's relationship with others in some segment of the organization changes. One moves toward the 'center of things' or away toward the 'periphery.' When examining this dimension, the question must be asked how important to others on the immediate sense is a given member's role in the workings of a particular group, department, or organization? Thus the radial dimension must involve the social rules norms, and values through which a person's worthiness to a group is judged by members of that group. It concerns in part, then, the shared notions of what the 'realwork' of any organizational segment is at any given time. To move along this dimension is to become accepted by others as a central and working member of the particular organizational segment and this can normally not be accomplished unless the member-in-transition demonstrates that he or she too shares the same assumptions as others in the setting to what is organizationally important and what is not." (p. 221-222)
The image does help explain what this text is talking about. In the figure the person moves from the edge of the circle in towards the center as... 1) newcomer; then 2) proviso member [accepted by not permanent]; 3) confederate [permanent membership]; 4) confidant [tenure granted]; 5) central figure [leader].
In this set up I think I only ever got as far in as the 2nd step - proviso member [accepted but not permanent]. A lot of the time (#2, 3, 4, & 6 in my positions) I was probably more at the 1st step - newcomer. I think part of this was my fault in not really accept a lot of the core values and norms of the group, and part of it was sort of disciplinary or implied (to me at least) a warning.
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"Newcomers to most hierarchical levels and functional areas in virtually all organizations inevitably remain 'on the edge' of the organizational affairs for some time after entrance for a host of reasons. They may not be deemed trustworthy by other members of the scene. They may not yet have had time to develop and present the sort of affable, cynical, easy going, or hard-driving front maintained and expected by critical others in the setting which marks membership in the particular segment of the organization to which the newcomer has been assigned. Or, quite typically, newcomers must first be tested either informally or formally as to their abilities, motives, and values before being granted inclusionary rights which then permit them: (1) to share organizational secrets, (2) to separate persentational rhetoric used on outsiders to speak of what goes on in the setting from the operational rhetoric used by insiders to communicate with one another as to the matters-at-hand, and/or (3) to understand the unofficial yet recognized norms associated with the actual work going on and the moral conduct expected of people in the particular organizational segment." (p. 222)
Overall, I don't have a problem with this, but in the setting of a Christian organization there should be biblical constraints as to the extent and nature of these kinds of things. For example, in the Vienna mission, organizational secrets ended out justifying things that I think were blatantly unbiblical, and in such cases the usual channels of accountability are absent, thus magnifying the problem by allowing the organization free reign to do whatever it wanted - as long as it could present an adequate front to those stakeholders it cared about in order to convince them that things were normal enough to at least not cause red flags to go up. Normal in this context is virtually identical with "biblical" but there may also be other extrabiblical ethical concerns that come in to play as well.
As far as my relationship with the mission went, I wasn't privy to much by way of organizational secrets and I don't know that I ever really understood the informal norms very well. If at any time I acted in accordance to them, it was most likely that I was actually just acting by my conscious or how I thought I should act or what might be reasonable, although I did learn a little about the organizational norms. Since I was uncertain about the norms I didn't tend to take a lot of initiative in things that I might have not been clear about the norms regarding. This might have come across as being "docile" but it was actually just being uncertain how to act and so watching others to try to learn from them. In this way, though, if the mission took this as being "docile" (read: totally submitted) then they might have thought I was farther along than I was and they did give some indication that this could have been so. For example, I doubt highly that they would have given me opportunities for ministry trips if they had thought I was still holding back a lot.
So, putting these three dimensions together: I was functionally a secretary (or receptionist) which would put me on the lowest rungs (heirarchy) in administration (because of who I was secretary for and by virtue of not knowing what else to do with "receptionist" I am putting it under administration). And I was always in one or the other of the 2 farthest out (least influential) rungs of inclusion.
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I'm leaving the textual discussion again... Now that my apartment looks like a hurricane hit it (and hurricane season is still months away!), I found the books I was looking for right under my nose! Well, anyway, I found all those other books (including the "how to study the Bible" books).
I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to approach this subject, but I somehow feel that I just need to do it. It's not that I haven't been thinking about it though, so I have a couple ideas in mind of where I want to go with it. If you've been following this at all, you probably understand by now that you're getting a process view of what I'm thinking, rather than a polished end product. The thing is that these thoughts have been percolating in one way or another for years, even decades.
Well, without further ado, the next subject for my preamble (or postscript, as the case might be) is.... program evaluation. Yup, that's it. Program evaluation. Remember, a lot of my graduate work was in the field of adult education, and the mission I was part of would be considered adult religious education.
Now, really, there's a lot you can do with program evaluation and it's probably not as straight forward as you might be thinking. Here are some examples of what I mean:
1. Do you want to do a formative or a summative evaluation?
2. What are the main questions of concern?
3. Who are the stakeholders?
4. What is the purpose of the evaluation?
5. Will it be an internal or external evaluation?
6. What are the (office) politics concerns?
7. What kind of data will be needed to answer the questions?
8. How will the data be collected?
9. What criteria will be used to analyze the data?
10 What evaluation model will be used?
11. How will communication be handled? (progress reports, various stakeholders, final report, opportunity for commenting, etc.)
12. What is the timeline for the study?
13. How much will the evaluation cost?
14. What ethical considerations should be taken into account in the study?
This is just a suggestive list as to what might be included in an evaluation of the mission I worked for. Now you understand that I am writing this hypothetically - that is, as I write this it's 2011, but I'm going to be pretending it's somewhere between 1987 and 1989, when I was with the mission.
I expect this to be somewhat fun. However I will confess that I'm stronger at qualitative research, so there's a good chance this evaluation won't involve very complex statistical computations.
This is how I've been thinking about approaching this new topic: I'm thinking about doing a formative study of organizational processes. That's pretty broad, though, so I've got my work cut out for me. I'll just leave you with this definition of "evaluation," to get you thinking about it:
"1. The key sense of the term 'evaluation' refers to the process of determining the merit, worth, or value of something, or the product of that process. Terms used to refer to this process or part of it include: appraise, analyze, assess, critique, examine, grade, inspect, judge, rate, rank, review, study, test. ... The evaluation process normally involves some identification of relevant standards of merit, worth, or value; some investigation of the performance of evaluands on these standards; and some integration or synthesis of the results to achieve an overall evaluation or a set of associated evaluations. It contrasts with measurement process, which also involves the comparison of observations against standards, in that (i) measurement is characteristically not concerned with merit, only with 'purely descriptive' properties, and (ii) those properties are characteristically unidimensional, which avoids the need for the integrating step. The integration is sometimes judgmental, sometimes the result of complex calculation, very commonly a hybrid of the two.
In this sense evaluation is what distinguishes food from garbage, lies from truth, and science from superstitition. In short, it is the sine qua non of intelligent thought and action and in particular of professional practice...
Now, evaluation is not so difficult that one can explain its neglect as simply due to being 'put in the Too Hard basket', as the Australians say; it was in fact extensively practiced by those who denied its legitimacy. The explanation appears to be in part that for many people and organizations, evaluation is one of the most threatening phenomena in their experience. Some of them - the valuephobes - will lie, cheat, steal, and plot to avoid its occurrence or its impact, a phenomenon that often takes novice evaluators by surprise when they become the victim of character assassination. The conscientious practice of evaluation is thus more hazardous as well as more far-reaching than most applied social science research. People are often surprised to learn that Consumers Union, the bastion of product evaluation, was put on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations in the war against Japan and Germany, and that ... the current Director of the National Bureau of Standards was dismissed for providing, at Congressional request, an unfavorable although valid evaluation of a battery additive. They should remember that a large number of conscientious professionals in medicine as in journalism have lost their jobs for doing nothing more than what ethics requires with the results of good evaluations. Moreover, they should understand that the practice of evaluation is hard on evaluators for its own reasons, independently of the machinations of hostile evaluees. It is hard to maintain objectivity in the face of caused pain or joy and to decline bribe and threat combinations of various degrees of severity. The avoidance of evaluation thus achieves considerable support from many of those who would be obliged to do it, as well as those who would be subject to it.
If evaluation causes anxiety and the erection of defenses in many people, it is a source of power - over those who have not come to terms with it. As usual, this leads to efforts to reserve the power for a priesthood." (Scriven, Michael. 1991. Evaluation Thesaurus, 4th ed. Newbury Park, California: Sage, p. 139-140)
Evaluations can happen in all kinds of institutions, but nonprofits is one place where they are especially used a lot. Funders often require them for funding, although I never was aware that funder of the Vienna mission made such demands on them. Here are some examples of this, though:
1. A United Way program evaluation worksheet
2. The Ford Foundation's evaluation philosophy
3. Evaluation in the church context
4. One seminary's approach to evaluation
That's all for now. Till next time...
~ Meg
