I wish I could say I'm all rested up and raring to go this morning, but I'm not. I'm still tired. Nevertheless, I'm up, so... on with the show!
***
This is our last chapter in this book:
Chapter 9, Work Organizations as Contexts for Trust and Betrayal, by James H. Morris and Dennis J. Moberg, p. 163-187.
Actually, the subject of this chapter also comes up in sources in other files too.
***
"Three work-process conditions increase the need for personal trust between functionality interdependent workers: (1) ambiguous or dynamic tasks, (2) difficulty in observing tasks, (2) outcomes that are hard to assess (Govindarajan and Fisher, 1990; Ouchi, 1979)." (p. 166)
I'll discuss these in the next chapter sections, which are based on these three situations.
***
"Ambiguous or Dynamic Tasks...
Fiduciary responsibility requires the trustee to preserve the interests of those who have conferred trust (e.g., the employer, the military organization, the government), and it requires the trustee to subordinate his or her own self-interest....
"The distinction between technical competence and fiduciary responsibility should be important in deliberations about conferring personal trust... It is probably easy to think of examples in which people whom we know to have the technical skill to perform a job well cannot always be relied on to do so of their own volition, and vice versa." (p. 167)
I'm going to address the issues here in relation to my work in Vienna. I don't think I have ever given any employer reason to think that there is reason to doubt my 'fiduciary responsibility' as implied in the last sentence here quoted. I'm the kind of person that you want on your committee - I'm going to pull my own weight and come through. And if there is any doubt that I'll be able to complete a task within the given perimeters I work the communication channels to make sure everyone who needs to know about this does. However, the issue in Vienna was not regarding whether I would do my work or not; it wasn't about my 'fiduciary responsibility'.
***
"Behaviors That Are Difficult to Observe...
"Examples of jobs in which the trustee's behavior is difficult to observe include traveling salespersons, missionaries, and covert intelligence agents. In each of these jobs, the trustee's actual conduct is difficult to observe because of physical distance from the colleagues or parent organizations who have conferred trust. Yet even when jobs are conducted in close proximity to one another, it can be difficult to observe task behaviors in a meaningful way because (1) particular patterns of behavior cannot reliably be linked to desired results (e.g., many different ways of doing the job may be appropriate for the objective at hand, but the observer cannot determine which ways are and are not appropriate) or (2) the behaviors of the trustee are deliberately veiled." (p. 168)
I'm not sure I necessarily like "missionaries" being so closely aligned with "covert intelligence agents," but even following "traveling salespersons" involves some distasteful issues.
But getting back to my situation in Vienna... since I was an office worker, my work wasn't any more difficult to monitor than your average secretary, although I did do a little traveling for the mission. I don't think I "deliberately veiled" anything involving the carrying out of my duties. Whatever task I was given I tried to carry out to the best of my ability, and I don't think there was ever any question about that.
***
"In summary, work organizations cannot always remove the need for personal trust between members, nor can they fully indemnify such trust when it emerges. What organizations can do, however, is to encourage local work contexts in which the members themselves develop covenantal understandings, strong normative regulation, and loyal commitments to one another - all of which are important social conditions for the rational bestowal of personal trust." (p. 171)
Since there was a lot of ambiguity about what the mission's intentions towards me were (i.e., suggestions about this or that opportunity somewhere down the pike), I'm just going to address what my concrete responsibilities were in actuality. I eventually felt like the mission would not really trust me until it had a firm grip on my whole life, including relationships and extracurricular activities. If you know anything about me, however, you should know my basic personality doesn't agree with such confinements. I'm not inclined to give anyone that kind of control or influence over my life.
***
The next section of the chapter is:
"Organizational Control Systems and Need for Personal Trust"
"All organizations must rely to some degree on external controls (e.g., written job descriptions, rules, policies, standard operating procedures, hierarchical supervision, productive or sales quotas, formal performance appraisal systems, phone monitoring, and polygraph examinations), but such controls typically are aimed at preserving the impersonal trust inherent to the employment relationship, namely, the meeting of formally prescribed role expectations. As we suggested above, however, in certain circumstances, functionally dependent organization members must convey personal trust in their colleagues to contribute the spontaneous, unprescribed actions that are necessary to get the job done well, and to preserve the good faith that is elemental to that trust. External controls alone can neither encourage nor maintain such personal trust among functionally dependent organization members.
By contrast, internal control systems rely less on official mandates and surveillance and more on participant self-control and peer influence... An emphasis on internal control seems particularly apropos when the need for personal trust is high. Instead of focusing on detection and correction of inappropriate behavior, internal control systems rely on creating contexts in which informal (e.g., social) impediments to incompetent or self-interested behavior tend to arise..." (p. 171-172)
Now I'm sure that the list of relevant professions mentioned in the earlier quote ("traveling salespersons, missionaries, and covert intelligence agents") wasn't necessarily meant to be exhaustive, but suggestive, but I'm going to let the list limit my discussion anyway.
My job description in Vienna was as a secretary (albeit in a missionary setting), but I wasn't a missionary in the sense most likely intended here, wherein a person has the hands-on people-contact type of mission work. So as far as the job is concerned, I don't think that you could say I met the "missionary" criteria for purposes of this discussion. Now, I wouldn't say that the mission was exactly "covert intelligence" either, but I do think that my situation actually has more in common with a "covert intelligence" context than with "missionary." In a covert intelligence setting I suspect that it to a certain point it doesn't really matter what your actual position is; if you are a secretary in a covert intelligence office, then this need for "internal control" even extends you, and not just the agents out in the field. The agents, for example, need to know that you are reliable and won't blow their cover. This is the kind of thing that was going on in Vienna. In regards to the need for internal or external control my situation was more like that of a secretary in a covert operations office than that of a secretary in a mission office.
If that doesn't make sense to you now, you'll have plenty of opportunity later on to catch on.
***
"Under internal control systems, the group uses its social influence to regulate members' work activities. Identification with and loyalty to one's colleagues are thought to be engendered when a group members sees himself or herself as a pivotal contributor to the group's outcomes and when the group is viewed by the member to be an important source of personal success" (p. 173)
This sounds foreign to me. I include it here because this might point to something else going on in my Vienna experience that isn't addressed in this text. For example, I don't remember thinking that the group used its influence to regulate my work activities - the actual job I did. There may have been some of that, but the off-hours influence was what I sensed most. Maybe that's just because I did technically do my job fully to my best abilities and so there was no need to apply pressure there, or that wasn't an area where I could be influenced, and so the focus for my experience was off-hours activities.
***
This next chapter section is...
Personal Trust and Personal Betrayal in the Work Setting
"... [P]ivotal expectations involve covenantal understandings about moral conduct, justice, and human decency that are more fundamental than the formal codes and mandates emplaced by any particular organization. Pivotal expectations can also be distinguished by the high degree of psychological investment or commitment that inheres in the people who hold them. Although they may be implicit, pivotal expectations are sacred - they have a powerful and fundamental influence on the person who holds them and are elemental to that person's sense of social identity. In this respect, pivotal expectations serve as constraints not only on the person toward whom they are held but also on the person who holds them toward others...
... For the person who holds them, violations of pivotal expectations can constitute significant, perhaps catastrophic, disturbances to the social foundations of personal trust." (p. 175-176)
This section, in contrast to a lot of the earlier discussion, refers to how I felt regarding the mission. I hope you can see by now that I have fundamental beliefs that the mission in Vienna betrayed, in my view. It was indeed catastrophic to me, and even to this day the horror of it extends to churches who I see as being "accomplices in the crime" by their unwillingness to hold the missions accountable, not just for how I was treated, but for their general modus operandi. This lack of willing oversight has created in me a great ambivalence regarding churches, even when I would otherwise agree with their theology. In this way, the catastrophe continues to this day in the form of how I relate to/feel about churches in the here and now.
***
The next section is...
"A Prototype of Feeling Betrayed"
"We propose that four dimensions are primary objects of attention in the reasoning that a victim does when a trustee violates the victim's pivotal expectations in the work setting: (1) sufficient harm, (2) intentionality, (3) personalization, and (4) inadequate redress." (p. 176)
That's me... I feel that sufficient harm was done intentionally to me personally with inadequate redress in Vienna. That is, all four of these sub-parts describe me/my situation vis a vis the Vienna mission(s).
***
I'm skipping over points 1 and 2 above and going to 3, about personalization. After explaining how there are levels of personalization, from the highest being against the person solely and directly down to actions taken against the larger group that the person identifies with. At the end of this discussion on personalization the text concludes that:
"Overall, personalization is perhaps the key dimension in determining the emotional stink of personal trust violation because it threatens the victim's views of his or her own social identity and sense of agency... High personalization requires the victim to adjust orientations toward the particular transgressor. But perhaps more unfortunately, it can so disturb the victim's fundamental views of self and others that the victim is less able to trust anyone." (p. 182)
My dad later picked up on this, but in a situation where it was totally irrelevant, implying, I think, that an action I took was out of paranoia. Let me explain. That particular context was when I dropped out of my doctoral studies, which my dad attributed to my lack of trust in the leadership of the program. But the main reason was that I kept hearing that I was on a track to become a professor and it's not that in general I didn't want to be a professor, but I didn't want to be a professor in Adult Education because I hadn't realized before that the field of adult education in the USA (in contrast to many other countries, but far from all) is focused mainly on supporting the workforce. In other countries there are stronger individual improvement segments of the field (think European Folk High School) or grassroots community development (e.g., participatory action research) or popular education (Brazil's Paolo Freire and beyond). I'm not the least interested in dedicating my life to making sure that corporations (who are "persons" in US law) can have workers to meet their interests, which may or may not be the best interests of the workers. Even ESL and literacy in the US is so mainstream, I tried and tried to find popular education programs here and I was shocked at how few and far between these are. THAT is why I dropped out, not because of lack of trust or paranoia. That was my reason at the time and it remains so to this day. After I left the program I went on to do social movement learning research ON MY OWN for which I gave numerous conference presentations. Sorry, dad, you're wrong here. Later I read that in a book on the history of the American Library Association that in the 1920s (I believe that's when it was) ALA was considering developing closer connections to the then manifestation of adult education association (there were several changes throughout the years in adult education association name and function in the USA), but they found, even back then, that adult education was too conservative, so they decided not to proceed that with that collaboration.
But back to the text. Yes, my trust in other churches is not what it was prior to my Vienna experience. But I think of it as being a case of knowing too much and not believing that anything's changed and believing also that churches back home don't have any problem with that modus operandi, which I still disagree with completely (can you tell?). Sometimes when I find a church that that isn't an issue with I might have other problems, like general disagreements of theology, which is not particularly related to the Vienna issue. After all, I was raised in a pretty opinionated church context, way before anything about Vienna came into play.
***
Now on to the 4th issue, inadequate redress.
"...[R]edress can involve efforts by the trust violator to (1) undo the harm or remove its objective effects, (2) soothe the implications of high perceived intentionality and personalization, as with an apology..., or (3) provide compensation after the fact for acknowledged harm." (p. 183)
The missions in Vienna did none of these things, and I suspect they may well think they did nothing wrong in relation to me. I also think that some things happened to me specifically which they weren't aware of, or which only a few might have known. The problem with the likelihood of there could have even been an effective redress is that 1) I felt that how I was treated was a part of the modus operandi in general, although perhaps in a rather extreme manifestation of it, but not out of character, and 2) if what happened vis a vis my experiences while with the mission involved other things related to my dad, they might not have even been able to do anything about it without putting the ministry at risk. If part of my experience in Vienna was connected with my dad's work, then it could very well be that the mission or only very few of them knew about these kinds of things. If that is the case, they might have been somewhere bewildered also at my actions, not being completely aware of all of the causes of my actions. Even so, the mission did enough clearly on its own, things that it quite clearly and actively did in relation to me, for whatever reason, that I think I had/have reasonable cause to "feel betrayed."
***
"Given a strong sense of personal betrayal, the victim's efforts at redress are likely to depend on his or her sense of power and control over the transgressor or parties who have the capacity to extract restitution from the transgressor." (p. 184)
After about 5 months into my time in Vienna, I realized I was up against a behemoth, and began to feel pretty powerless to wield any influence. For a long time, though, I did hold out a little glimmer of hope that I would be found to be a valuable worker and we could talk openly (which would have to have entailed a certain amount of equality of relationship considering my virtually lost faith in them). Eventually I realized that that was just wishful thinking and naivete on my part.
***
That's all for that book, but I'll talk about some of these things from different perspectives more as we go on, especially in a couple other files that deal with these kinds of issues.
~ Meg
