I'm going to start picking up again where I left off in my story, but I'm still recuperating, so it's going to be somewhat slower. The main thing now is that I still get tired so easily and end out usually taking hour long naps in the afternoon. I'm hoping it's just a phase in my recovery, but I'm half afraid it could be the start of chronic fatigue syndrome. Time will tell, I guess.
At any rate, I finished chronicling the events of the past 6 months or so in quite a bit of detail elsewhere. Since they are current I decided to write about them openly and not use a pseudonym, but they'll eventually merge with this material here when I get that far in the story and am ready to reveal myself. I'm expecting that even when I finish the chronology I'm going to want to go over it all as a whole and do some editing to clarify things that seem to need that, add things that I may have omitted, delete things that might not be so important, as well as fix any linguistic errors.
As I left off I was just getting to my move to Vienna. But since it's been such a long time since I've written I'm going to warm up to that by going over another file. I'm sorry if you're reading straight through this and didn't have such a long break in reading as I have in writing, but I think I need it and also it might provide some more useful background information to you the reader. This file is "Socialization". By this I mean specifically "Organizational Socialization", which Wikipedia defines as:
Organizational socialization
- Organizational socialization is the process whereby an employee learning the knowledge and skills necessary to assume his or her organizational role.[10] As newcomers become socialized, they learn about the organization and its history, values, jargon, culture, and procedures. They also learn about their work group, the specific people they work with on a daily basis, their own role in the organization, the skills needed to do their job, and both formal procedures and informal norms. Socialization functions as a control system in that newcomers learn to internalize and obey organizational values and practices.
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I'm starting out here with a general discussion of socialization - some of the texts I have are more focused on specific situations or aspects of socialization. These are sections from The Handbook of Work, Organization and Society (1976), edited by Richard Dubin.
"Implicit in the analysis of adult socialization to work and work career is the notion that the individual is being acted upon in the interests of the work organization. It is presumed that the individual will be adaptive and responsive to the socializing efforts." (p. 67, from the introduction)
In general this sounds pretty benign and routine. But what if the socializing involves issues that go contrary to you values and beliefs? Of course, the carrot and stick can be pretty potent when they involve a person's source of income and career.
I'm not a cultural relativist, but I don't think I'm a cultural bigot either. That is, I do think that there are things that are right or wrong irrespective of culture, and that includes my native culture. This also includes organizational culture, in my opinion. Not that I could have said this so succinctly when I was in the throes of being "socialized", if that's what it was.
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Chapter 3, Breaking In: Socialization to Work, by John Van Maanen, p. 67-129.
"Throughout this analysis, the term organizational socialization will be preferred to the tern occupational socialization because it directs attention to the dominant setting in which the process occurs. Although the two socialization processes are often interdependent, the position taken in this chapter is that the characteristics of the socialization setting are far more crucial to the eventual outcomes of the process than are the specific occupational attributes to be inculcated." (p. 67)
Occupational socialization is socialization into your field, while organizational socialization is socialization to a specific organization (work place). In my context, the occupational socialization would have been the short term and part-time mission work I did and also my formal Bible school education. This socialized me into missions and missions to Eastern Europe in particular.
However, when I arrived in Vienna I would experience, not occupational socialization, but organizational socialization - socialization into that mission's way of thinking and doing things. Before my Vienna work, I would have had some organizational orientation in my short-term and part-time mission work too, especially since it was all with one mission.
I can't remember if it's in this file that this comes up in or somewhere else, but one of the things here is that there can be conflicts between professional and organizational socializations. This is especially true, as I understand it, in professional positions.
When I went to Vienna, I came there with values and theology inculcated in me at Bible school especially, but also other values, such as ones I was raised with at home. Nothing I learned in any of these experiences, including in my short-term or temporary mission work, prepared me for the socialization awaiting me in Vienna.
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"Related to the postulated learning process, organizational socialization also implies that a man may be forced to relinquish certain attitudes, values, and behaviors. Schein (1968a) succinctly refers to this aspects as the 'price of membership.' At its best, organizational socialization results in the matching or melding of individual and organizational pursuits. At its worst, the process may lead to rejection by the individual of the expressed requirements of the organization." (p. 68)
Presumably, if a new missionary were required to "relinquish certain attitudes, values, and behaviors" to be fully integrated into a mission, there should be good Biblical backing for this and also backing for the techniques and processes used, right? If you answered, "right" to that question you can understand how encountering something seemingly diametrically to the contrary would be a shock to the system... especially for someone who'd prepared so meticulously and for years to arrive in the mission field well-equipped for the job. When the Bible was used as evidence it was used manipulatively, in my opinion.
Although it is mostly true that I was an "At its worst" case, it can't be completely true, because I often wasn't sure what the "expressed requirements" were to reject them.
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"Taking role-acquisition as the central concern of socialization, Brim views personality in terms of a person's perception of self and his behavior in relation to the social organization in which he acts... the socialization process is seen by Brim (1966:9) as:
The manner in which an individual learns the behavior appropriate to his position in a group, through interaction with others who hold normative beliefs about what his role should be and who reward or punish him for correct or incorrect actions." (p. 69)
Taking this from the top... I was never in one position more than about 6 months, and there were times when there were also insinuations of other changes. So it hardly seems like in my case being socialized into the position itself was central.
I will affirm the method of carrot/stick (good ole' positive/negative reinforcement psychology) as being used in Vienna. Except it didn't seem like they were using it primarily to socialize me into a role (since the role was such a moving target).
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On pages 70 to 71 van Maanen discusses various life-cycle socializations and how it changes as we mature. He then postulates that just as the life-cycle socialization phases change and build on one another, so is organizational socialization structured (at least in general terms).
The scary thing about that is the sixth and last "change postulated [which] is a transformation from idealism to realism" (p. 71)
I understand that there are both realistically (Thomas Aquinas, etc.) and idealistically (St. Augustine, etc.) oriented Christians, but to be forced into a realistic position? Not in so many words, of course, but in essence.
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Then he continues, quoting Brim (1966):
"As the child matures, he is taught to realize that there is a distinction between the ideal and the real, and learns to take his part in society accordingly to the realistic expectations, rather than attempting conformity to ideal norms." (p. 71)
Funny, that's not what they taught me in Sunday school... Seriously, though, in my context this would be like learning to not bother conforming to the Bible, but rather conform to the organizational standards, irregardless of what "ideal norms" are given in the Bible.
Not that the Bible wasn't used at times to back something, but too often I thought it was a manipulative use of Scripture - either pulling something out of context or only looking at one small piece of an issue rather than looking at the full Scriptural teaching on an issue. As far as I'm concerned, this kind of thing is out of place especially in a Christian mission - and you can call me an idealist on this count.
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Here's a scenario from the context of police acadamies:
"If the recruit demonstrates that he is unable to operate the weapon, the training program seeks to upgrade his skills. If he is unwilling to spend the time learning this skill, then motivational devices are used to induce the appropriate spirit through the use of special rewards and punishments (e.g., withholding a portion of the recruit's pay, or assign him extra duty). If it appears, however, that education about the values is required, the individual is coached, pressured, or otherwise persuaded to accept the general values of the organization. If the recruit still has problems accepting the values, he is usually dismissed from the organization, although it is conceivable that therapeutic procedures might be instituted to solve this dilemma (e.g., special counseling with the police chaplain). Only in the most extreme case is the recruit assumed not to be motivated toward the appropriate subcultural values. In this case the recruit is immediately dismissed and stigmatised." (p. 71-72).
Don't get me wrong on this, I don't know that the mission in Vienna was quite as systematic as this police training academy was, but even so, I think they were equally "professional" in their handling of my socialization. I think it's safe to say they used every single one of these tactics with me, sometimes simultaneously. But they weren't trying to teach me a skill, as in this example. I don't think skill level was ever the issue.
This lets you see some of the processes involved in how this might happen, at least in one context.
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This chapter has subparts and I was hoping to take a break at one of those places, but I need to go do some other things, so we'll just pick up later where we left off.
