It seems to me that the only people who might be interested in my ramblings would be social scientists or psychologist, and this would be for research purposes, and I'd become the subject of some kind of qualitative research project. Other than that, people who were interested in this or that part of my postings might be interested in portions of the content. To reach a broader audience, I'd have to do a lot of redaction, which I'll, hopefully, eventually get around to. It's not as if this is particularly easy reading; there are a lot of details that would be hard to connect. But they were/are also often hard for me to connect, as this project, from the beginning - meaning, I suppose, when I actually experienced these things - was hard to understand.
***
The next thing I'd like to say about my relationship with my family is regarding framing.
I first became aware of framing in my social movement studies, beginning in 1999, and, as it turns out, that area of research has been one of the main areas to more fully develop the concept of framing. Other social and psychological specialties also use the term, however, sometimes with their own unique twists to defining the term. This paragraph from a Wikipedia entry seems like a good synopses of my understanding of the term:
"In his 2009 work, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action[3] Kuypers offers a detailed template for doing framing analysis from a rhetorical perspective. According Kuypers, "Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event, and are generally the central organizing idea." [4] Kuypers’ work is based on the premise that framing is a rhetorical process and as such it is best examined from a rhetorical point of view."
How this relates to my family is that individuals within it have developed various understandings of various events, and these understanding or meanings are the framing. Once a frame is developed, at least in my family, it seems that other events are interpreted also from the standpoint of that frame. This ends out affecting not only the understanding of events and series of events, but also understandings of individuals and their character or personality. Some of these frames refer to me or refer to situations that are somehow related to me. Over time these frames build up, and if subsequent events seem to confirm (or at least not contradict) these frames, then the frames become stronger and may even grow in strength or become applied to more situations. As this happens, things that don't fit the frame may be either not noticed or ignored, especially if the frame has sort of taken a life of its own and there is some stake built up around it. These frames often involve some emotional attachment, which can be a positive emotional attachment towards something/someone and/or a negative emotional attachment against something/someone.
My family has a lot of these frames regarding me and my life. There are at least a couple difficulties with this, however. The first is that I have moved around a lot (although I never really wanted to move so much, and this will come up much later in my chronology), and some of my living situations have been ones that the family would not have had a lot of experience with; Vienna is one of these situations, but Siberia even moreso. But the other issue here is that family members are about the only people who have at least known me through all these moves and visited me in a lot of them, so apart from my perspective, they would be the next best ones to have any insight into them, at least in a composite way - taking them all together. There are others along the way that could or could have (some are deceased now, for example) vouched for my claims about my life at any given point.
Another issue is that of self-interest. Each family member, including myself, is likely to have a stake in various understandings of my life. That is to say that any given frame might be advantageous, neutral or disadvantageous for any particular individual. Needless to say, there would be a tendency, at the very least to avoid disadvantageous perspectives.
The last thing I want to say about this right now is that each individual has a power standing within the family and each frame also has a certain power standing within the familial psyche or memory. At the moment I'm low on the totem pole, and in as much as my framing of my life differs from anyone else's in the family the impact of my frames will be greatly affected by my standing within the family. If at any time my power might change then the impact of my frames would likewise change. This change would happen because individuals in the family would re-visit what frames about me might be more or less advantageous at that point. In this way their framing of me and my life fluctuates, not so much based on what they think or understand as being true or not, but based more on what they think might be more or less in their personal self-interest.
I've said a lot by way of theory, and it's definitely colored by my perception of the family (i.e., I have no great claim to objectivity here), but I hope you can see where these things could have impact on my attitude towards the family, at least in a very general way. Of course, I haven't mentioned any details here, such as specific examples, and I'll try to fill that in in later posts.
Back to the text...
***
The next descriptive continue regarding socialization methods is that of how sequential or nonsequential a method is.
"Sequential socialization refers to transitional processes marked by a series of discrete and identifiable stages through which an individual must pass in order to achieve a defined role and status in the organization ... Nonsequential processes are accomplished in one transitional stage..." (p. 26)
I don't think this really applies to the Vienna mission context because it was very rare that a person would be promoted to another position. In other words, once a secretary, always a secretary. It wasn't completely unheard of to have such changes, but there weren't any while I was there. An example of a possible promotion would be if the (for example) Romania country coordinator left the mission and another missionary on the Romania team was chosen to take his place. Since these events would have been rare I'm going to move on.
***
The fixed/variable continuum is the next variable in socialization methodology.
"Organizational socialization processes differ in terms of the information and certainty an individual has regarding his transition timetable. Fixed socialization processes provide a recruit with a precise knowledge of the time it will take him to complete a given step... Variable socialization processes do not give those being processed any advance notice of their transition timetable." (p. 28)
The Vienna mission clearly used a variable socialization process. They would most likely deny that they even used any socialization methods at all, but in any case, the job wasn't done until the person was socialized, and even then it (the need for socialization) was probably also open to future consideration as the need arose.
***
This next quote comes in the context of discussing how fixed socializations can sometimes become variable ones, which is irrelevant to the Vienna context. I'm including it here, though, because it, nevertheless, contains some helpful insights:
"Some organizations even go so far as to provide a special membership category for certain types of role failures. Some police agencies, for example, give recruits unable to meet agent demands long-term assignments as city jailers or traffic controllers. Such assignments serve as a signal to the recruit and to others in the organization that the individual has left the normal career path.
To the extent that these organizational 'Siberias' [!] exist and can be identified by those in the fixed setting, chronic side-tracking from which there is rarely a return is a distinct possibility." (p. 29; bracketed exclamation mark mine)
How this fits my Vienna experience... well I can imagine that you foresee that I'm going to say that I was sidelined like this. As to Siberia... my contention is that that experience (my initial contract work in Siberia) was a politically devised recruitment. Also not very helpful from a career perspective. But back to Vienna...
I held 2 positions with the Vienna mission that could be, I think, understood in the manner described by this text. The first such position was in Dallas - the State-side branch of the mission. In this case I was demoted by about 5500 miles. I held this office position for about 3 months or so. In the second case, in which I was demoted to receptionist, involved only a demotion from the second floor of the Vienna office to the 1st floor. But in either case I was only a hairbreadth away from the front door (in the latter case literally and figuratively both).
The Dallas demotion could have served as an observation point to see how well I did and whether I should be returned to Vienna (although all my belongings were still there, so in any case I'd have to return there long enough to pack up at least) or sent home. In the second demotion, my time (2-year commitment) was coming to an end and there was no indication that anything other than that was going to happen. However, it wasn't general practice to demote someone before they left (at least not that I was aware of), so doing this probably meant that they needed to do some protective work on me before I left, and indicated that I was leaving on less than ideal terms, which is an understatement, to say the least. I'm sure that they had to find a balance from getting me overly upset and causing them problems and leaving on standard terms, which would mean leaving with some confidential knowledge, and potentially causing them harm with that knowledge. I don't think they fully understood my mindset - why I wasn't being socialized properly. I'm sure they had theories, but I think I was probably a bit of an enigma to them. In the end, though, they hurt me more than I could ever have hurt them, which is a very missionary way of acting (although it certainly would be far from the first time any such thing has ever happened in the history of missionary service, even if the exact circumstances might be quite different from mine).
I think this topic comes up in other articles too, if I remember correctly.
***
I'm going to end here for now.
~ Meg
