This next text is a book chapter:
Lang, Kurt. (1965) Mlitary organizations. In March, J. G. (Ed.). Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally, p. 838ff.
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"What remains distinctive to the armed forces is their basic orientation toward an image of the battlefield... It is from this orientation that the armed forces have their specific military character and the military establishment its distinctive forms." (p. 839)
I am going to apply this to the Vienna mission situation (and probably also, by extension, to (many) other missions to 'closed' countries) in comparison to missions in other types of situation. It's a special type of adversarial perspective that might be exemplified by things like the article in my candidates' course manual comparing the economic standards of the East (i.e., Communist countries) and West.
I don't have any indication that I can remember that dad thought along these lines, but there were probably those in U.S. military work that would have seen Christian missions as at least in a supportive role, intentionally or not, to other efforts to thwart or win over the big red enemy. I have already pointed out people I knew in this type of mission work with military background, including our two human resource staff in Vienna who were chaplains in the military reserves at the same time they were working with us.
This attitude toward the target country was probably a major basis for approaching missions differently than other missions not working in 'closed' countries. Also, in our case it was not just the fact that these were 'closed' countries, but that these countries were also seen as political enemies by society at large, which wouldn't have necessarily been true regarding other 'closed' countries. Nowadays, working in Muslim countries would probably be the counterpart to the then Communist countries. And because of this public opinion about the Communist countries the churches and supporters back home might have been more lenient in their demands for accountability, also.
Even when I was living in Russia, was mostly the years after the fall of Communism there, how few missionaries I met who knew the language - even missionaries living there. My understanding was that missions usually sent their new missionaries to language school either before getting to the field where s/he'd be working or at the beginning during a time when other mission responsibilities would be at most minimal until the language was learned. A gal I went to Bible school had almost 2 years of language training for a mission to Africa, so that she could learn French (a national language) and also the local language. The only mission I came in to contact with during my 6 1/2 years in Russia who knew Russian were a German church planting team in Krasnoyarsk. I understood this lack to be a carry over from the how missions in that part of the world were treated differently than other missions, even though at that point there was little need to continue in that way.
Maybe part of my problem was that I never really got into that way of thinking, even from way before my Vienna days. I wasn't drawn to that ministry because of the political nature of the area, but because of my heritage and my interest in the people. It's not that I didn't think about political issues, but that I wasn't so absorbed with it as others and the mission seemed to be.
This "orientation toward the image of the battlefield" not only affected interpersonal relations in the Vienna mission, but how the ministry was actually carried out also.
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Under the heading of "'Communal' Character of Military Life":
"The milieu of the military organization differs most clearly from that of the 'civilian' occupation in the degree to which organizational control extends to many phases of personal life normally left untouched....
Goffman's concept of the category of total institution as 'a place of residence and work where a large number of like situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life'...
Unless there is a strong identification with military goals, the curtailment of freedom to regulate one's own off-duty activities can be felt as a deprivation." (p. 848-849)
"Total institutions" include things like prisons and the like, but even the military, in which, certainly, members may physically leave the base, for example, to go to a civilian church or for school or whatever. As such, I think I would classify the Vienna mission as a total institution similar to how the military is also identified as such.
Also, the last quote is especially true of me regarding identifying with the institution. That is, I did identify strongly enough with the general goals of the ministry, but I didn't identify with a lot of the values and how they did things. Going back to our pragmatic ends and means discussion, I accepted the missions ends but not the means they took to try to get there. The broad brush means, of course, I knew about before coming and explained to others countless times during deputation. The saying about the devil being in the details was where I got hung up once I arrived in Vienna. If you can imagine this, or maybe you have some experience of this too, it's like the public p.r. image an organization portrays even when those inside the organization know that it's not a completely accurate picture, not in the sense of an incomplete picture but a misleading picture. Something can be incomplete but not misleading.
Since I never reached that kind of identification with the details of how they operated in Vienna, I did indeed feel like efforts (direct or otherwise) to curtail my freedom was not only a deprivation, but also unwarranted and unnecessary.
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I'm going to just sort of summarize the section titled "Authoritarian Ideology," because it's a bit involved.
The author in this section discusses, at least in part, several studies where a test was administered over time to new recruits to the military to identify whether any changes about authoritarian leadership had occurred. When this test was administered over a longer time frame (3 to 4 months) there were changes in which the new recruits viewed authoritarian leadership as less authoritarian.
In Vienna this might play out this way: A new recruit arrives in Vienna and is pretty soon confronted with a total institution and authoritarian (top-down) structure. Upon realization and initial experience of this she might identify all or most of the usual traits of authoritarianism, but a few months later might only recognize a few of such traits as being authoritarianism.
It's as if the new recruit had become acclimatized to it and did not think of her situation as being particularly authoritarian. Another context: a Western woman moves to a strict Muslim country or village and has to start wearing the burka. At first she might balk at this and think of it as demeaning and insulting, but eventually she gets used to it and thinks it's not so bad after all. That might not be a perfect example, either, but I hope you get the idea anyway.
I think this adjustment to authoritarian ideology happened in Vienna. It didn't happen to me, but as part of a total system I paid a heavy price for not conceding.
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That's all for that article. Now I'm going to go get lunch...
~ Meg
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Later addition: I found a few pages that got separated from the main text, so I'll address them now just to keep the comments on one text all together.
We're jumping ahead now to the summary statements:
"... Some measure of identification with the collectivity and some sense of generalized obligation and readiness to acknowledge the legitimacy of its demands in numerous particular situations must exist..." (p. 872)
My problems with the situation in Vienna included my hesitation in completely identifying with the collectivity and in acknowledging the legitimacy of some of the apparent demands being made on me.
As far as the identification was concerned, I didn't think they had the right to even demand what I saw as complete identification with them. When I got on the plane and crossed the "big puddle" (The Atlantic) I didn't leave my brains back home and I wasn't going to identify in such a way as to abrogate my ability to think for myself and disagree with them if I really disagreed with them.
I guess I covered legitimacy and identification in one fell swoop there. So now this is really and truly it for this article and we're moving on.
~ Meg
