Regarding the program evaluation, since I have to put it in the past so that I can set it up to be an evaluation of the Vienna mission as I knew it from 1987 to 1989, there has to be a certain amount of speculation and making things up (I'll try to keep this to a minimum to stay as close to how I experienced and observed the mission to be). So today I'm going to sort of set the stage for the evaluation.
Since I was working for the mission and the possibility of me actually performing an evaluation while I was with the mission is just altogether too far-fetched for even a make believe evaluation, I'm going to have to have someone other than myself do it. I'm going to say that I have an alter-ego, Erica Elliott, who runs a business (Christian Missionary Evaluation Services (CMEC)) that contracts out for external program evaluations.
* External evaluation: Evaluation conducted by an evaluator from outside the organization within which the object of the study is housed.
Yesterday I mentioned that this evaluation was also going to be a formative evaluation focusing (at least mostly if not entirely) on process factors.
* Formative evaluation: Evaluation designed and used to improve an object, especially when it is still being developed.
* Process evaluation: Process evaluation is an ongoing process in which repeated measures may be used to evaluate whether the program is being implemented effectively.
Here is the scenario:
Big Bucks Bible Foundation (BBBF) has, via undisclosed sources, learned that there are some things going on at the Vienna Mission (VM) that raise concerns for the foundation. The foundation is a major funder of the mission, and has in recent years accounted for roughly one-third of the mission's funding base. Because it has so much invested in the mission, and because it does otherwise think that the work of the mission is vital for the spread and development of Christianity in the parts of the world it works in, has decided it will pay the entire cost of the evaluation, and thereby avoid laying an extra financial burden on the mission. The external environment is such that there is a worldwide recession going on and, as a result funding has become tight and options for alternate sources of income, especially for large sums like the BBBF has been supplying the VM with in recent years, would be very difficult to come by.
The clincher is, however, that the foundation has decided that its continual support of the mission is contingent on the evaluation. That is, the mission must agree to the evaluation and not hinder its being carried out and it must also agree to carry out suggestions for improvement that are recommended based on the findings. The implementation of the findings will also be subject to another evaluation in 2 years. In this manner, the mission risks losing the support of this major funder at any of five possible junctures: 1) not agreeing to having the evaluation done; 2) hindering the evaluation process; 3) not agreeing to recommended improvements; 4) not making the necessary improvements (as determined by a second evaluation two years after the completion of the first evaluation); and/or 5) hindering the carrying out of the second evaluation.
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Now we'll return to my regular text discussion, which is based on my real experiences and observations of the Vienna mission. These quotes continue the texts used in my last post, in which a three-dimensional model of organizations was discussed.
"Given this model, some key postulates about the socialization process in organizations can be stated.
First, socialization, although continuous throughout one's career within an organization, is no doubt more intense and problematic for a member (and others) just before and just after a particular boundary passage." (p. 224)
In other words, the influence an individual has within the organization is inversely and directly related to influence the organization has on that individual. So, for example, when I entered the mission I had absolutely no influence and after five months, I had even less influence (because of being several thousand miles away from where I was supposed to be); 6 months later I had enough influence to persuade others that the birthday cake should be chocolate this month, but months later I had no influence again and a few months, later soon before my departure I had negative influence potential. Well, maybe I'm not a good example; let's try another, hypothetical, one: When a person enters the mission they have no influence power, but the mission has a lot of influence power on the individual. A year later the individual should have somewhat more influence power (but probably not a whole lot), and the mission has a bit less influence on the individual, until eventually x number of years later the person is the president of the company and has all the influence power and the mission has virtually none on him/her.
This isn't difficult to understand, in general, but I hope you can appreciate, at least a little, how it must feel to be in the career you dreamed about for years and really not like the organization you ended out with, but saw few or no other alternatives, and to end out after 2 years powerless to influence anything that you might disagree with. That is enough alone to crush a serious-minded professional
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"Second, a person is likely to have the most impact upon others in the organization, what Porter, Lawler, and Hackman (1975) call the 'individualization' process and what Schein (1971a) refers to as the 'innovation' process, at points farthest from any boundary crossing." (p. 224)
I guess I got ahead of myself in the last comments. I could add that after 2 years, though, I couldn't in my wildest dreams have thought I'd have gotten nowhere in my career advancement. I've already discussed, in one way or another, all the reasons why this could have been so, but maybe it's worth stating them again here all together. The reasons, I think, I left the mission as I did with having made no headway at all in my career (and arguably actually going backwards in it) include the following:
1) The mission's demands on me not being acceptable to me morally, ethically and biblically (esp. total submission)
2) My being a woman
3) My not having a Th.M.
4) My thinking of hands-on mission work as something that can happen outside of the classroom (i.e., not limiting it to the teaching ministry of the mission)
5) Possibly intervention because of my dad's work
6) There not being a realistic, workable grievance procedure in place
7) My being the only one with these kinds of problems
8) The mission putting security above just about anything else (the only possible competing value would be that of the teaching ministry itself, but I'm not sure which would have had the upper hand... which I really should address, even though it means going off on a tangent
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Okay, I'm going off on that tangent, because I need to deal with this at some point and don't want to forget to cover it later.
There are a lot of ways one could try to determine what is most important, but here are a few:
1. the amount of time and energy spent on something
2. the dedicated use of financial and other resources
3. what seems to command most of the organization's culture
4. where the focus is put in socialization efforts
Those are what I can think of now (esp. vis a vis the Vienna mission in this particular issue), but I'll address them very briefly one-by-one. Understand, though, that my vantage point was limited, although I was more of an insider than someone who otherwise didn't work for the mission at all, and everyone else had internalized the mission's values, so I may be the closest thing you have to an insider who is willing to talk (more or less) objectively about what was going on there.
1. I think on this score the mission did spend a lot more time and energy on the actual work. This is because the security procedures, I think, were intended to be in place in the background while the work was being done and as long as everyone had internalized everything and there wasn't anything unusually (e.g., my lack of total submission) threatening to the mission that might demand more dedicated attention the mission could focus directly on the work at hand and put the security issues on the back burner, or in remote control, if you wish.
2. The mission also spent more money on the ministry because the work was fairly expensive (consider, for example, textbook writing, design, publishing and delivery) and it would be hard to exceed that without having security comparable to the U.S. embassy in Moscow or something along those lines.
3. This is where I think the security issue overtakes the ministry itself. I think that the mission's culture was more a reflection of its security concerns than its ministry. Otherwise it wouldn't have made the compromises it had and it would have acted more mission-like and more solidly based on biblical mandates.
4. Socialization is clearly focused on security issues, especially initial socialization. (I can't speak for what internal advancement socialization might look like.) Just taking my experience, you'll see that this is blatantly so, because I basically did nothing (other than reading software manuals) the first 2 months I was with the mission. So you can't say that I was being socialized to the ministry, which in my case was the secretarial work I was supposed to be doing. So my socialization was close to 100% focused on security issues.
I showed yesterday how there weren't any direct verbal cues (along the lines of expressed anger, etc.) that might have been contrary to Scriptural teaching on how we should interact with one another, and here you can see that on paper the security issues also would not likely be picked up because the security efforts fall outside of what might have been easily documentable (such as on a financial spreadsheet). In this kind of a situation, then, you would expect the nonverbal (or only certain kinds of verbal) security-related cues to lie. I hope you can appreciate that it's going to be difficult to recreate those kinds of things this long after the fact. This is extremely important as we head into my chronological narration after I'm done discussing this article.
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"Third, because of the conical shape typically displayed by organizations, socialization along the inclusionary dimension is likely to be more critical to lower-placed members than higher-placed members since, according to the model, to move up in the organization indicates that some, perhaps considerable movement has already occurred inward. This presumes, however, an ideal-type, symmetrically shaped organization in which central members from the top to the bottom of the organization all share roughly the same norms and values. In fact, as Figure 5-A shows, organizations may be nonsymmetrically skewed, thus, hierarchically favoring the movement up of only those persons coming from a particular functional or inclusionary location. Consider, for example, those business concerns whose top executives invariably come from only certain functional areas of the organization. Similarly, organizations may also be tipped radically to the side (Figure 5-B). In such cases, certain inclusionary pre-requisites for career movements and their associated boundary passages have been more or less altered because 'insiders' at one level are 'outsiders' at another. Nor are 'insiders' in a favorable position to move upward in the organization, as might be the case in more symmetrically shaped firms where certain key values are shared by all 'insiders' regardless of level. To take an example, certain organizations headed by reform-minded top officials may make 'mountain climbers' out of some members who literally scale the vertical dimension of the organization from an outsider's or noninclusionary position. Yet, it is probably also true that during such a climb the climber has little effect upon any of the various groups in which he or she may have claimed membership, since the climber will never have developed a persuasive or influential position within those organizational segments." (p. 225)
Although formal position (within the heirarchy) within the Vienna mission did correlate well, I think, with the informal power positions (influence) in the organization, it wasn't exactly a 1:1 relationship. For example, I think that the director's secretary wielded more informal power than you'd expect. That is, as a secretary she was low in the hierarchy, although because of who she was secretary to she was the highest up of all the secretaries, but in addition to this she also had, I think, a lot of clout in the informal culture, such as with the women's meetings and the like. So in this way her informal power was arguably greater than her formal power. Before I go on let me clarify how I'm using these terms, although I understand it's possible they are only rough equivalents for each other:
hierarchical dimension = formal power = formal position within the hierarchy
functional dimension = departmental membership
inclusionary dimension = informal power = informal position within the organizational culture
Here are some other examples from the Vienna mission regarding how these different dimensions played out:
1. The director of publishing, I think, had less informal power than the director of the in-country work, and the director of publishing would probably have been less likely to have been moved up to a higher management position just because the department he led was less influential.
2. The Romania team had more clout than the others because it was the largest of the country teams.
3. Access to different kinds of information affected the culture of the different segments of the organization, but an attempt was made, for security purposes, to minimize this so that others (including others within the organization) would not necessarily know the extent or type of knowledge differences. The knowledge and skills needed in of any particular department and/or position would probably have had a values and cultural impact on those needing those kinds of knowledge and skills. For example, having detailed knowledge of the work in Romania and skills to function uniquely in that context might have resulted in bonding that team together and also made them, to a certain extent, different from, say, the East German team who had their own different knowledge and skill base, which included (in both cases - Romanian and E. German teams) being able to move about undetected by suspicious eyes within the respective country, for example. Another way knowledge would have affected the culture is that some knowledge of organizational functioning would only have been available at the very top. For example, it was there that they were most likely to know about funding issues, h.r. issues, or issues regarding relations between the various member missions and how it affected the work of the mission. Sometimes the knowledge involved in these various areas, as described above, probably involved ethical issues that the mission and the individuals directly involved had to make decisions about, some of which might have deviated from what one would normally expect of a Christian organization. It is likely that a lot of these things would have been kept under wraps, especially since we're talking about a Christian mission, which everyone expects to live on high moral grounds.
I think that last example could be broken up, but, since it's all inter-related, I'm not going to.
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In the next post I'll start in on a new major section of this journal article.
Now I have to go put away all the boxes of books strewn all over the place from last night's book search before I can start my usual Saturday laundry.
