This next text is:
Pascale, Richard. (1985). The paradox of "corporate culture": reconciling ourselves to socialization. California Management Review, 27(2), 26-41.
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"An MBA joining Bain and Company, the management consulting firm, is surprised by the incredible number of meetings he must attend - company meetings, recruiting meetings, office meetings, case team meetings, and near-mandatory participation on sports teams and attendance at social events. The objective is to build cohesiveness, participation, and close identification with the firm. There are a set of imperatives for working at Bain: "don't compete directly with peers," "make major conceptual contributions without being a prima donna," "demonstrate an ability to build on other's ideas." In aggregate, these features of Bain's culture are viewed as the underpinnings of success -- both internally and with clients." (p. 26)
This is presented as one of 4 case study examples of the kind of thing the author is going to discuss in the article, but I'm going to discuss it as a comparison point to my experience in Vienna.
Bain and Company (as presented here) is not an exact replica of what I found in Vienna, but there are elements of similarity nonetheless. The main thing I want to bring out here is the "near-mandatory participation on sports teams and attendance at social events." I didn't have any quibbles with attendance at organized social events like the monthly organization-wide women's meetings (including wives) nor the monthly all-staff meetings, as those seemed reasonable and certainly weren't excessive, but it rather, it was the sense that my whole free time and all my relations were within the realm of what the mission wanted (seemingly) absolute sway in, and anything less than that risked opening me up to suspicion and being labeled "independent" (as my father so aptly put it after I'd returned home for good).
The question seemed to be not "How much do I owe the mission?" but "How much freedom will the mission grant me?" These are two completely different mindsets, in which the first one postulates that if I do everything the mission requires of me, then the rest of my time and energies are at my discretion, and the second one is premised on the attitude that I will do only that which the mission has given me permission to do. The mission's demands in either case might be explicit or otherwise.
In the first approach, I might leave the office at 5:00, for example, and consider my time my own and do whatever I want thereafter until the next morning when I will return to the office again. But in the second situation I might return home and stay home (except to maybe go grocery shopping or the like) until I get some indication from the mission as to what I should do during this "free time." In the latter, situation I would be much more dependent on the mission and would be much more maleable as well. This enhanced maleability might even be the only reason for assuming this attitude, although it is highly probable (in my opinion) that security issues are the real issue (at least somewhere down the logical underpinnings of such a demand).
Now I don't know what you're take on this kind of thing is, but to me it ended out feeling rather cultish, manipulative and controlling. Even Bain and Company wouldn't have made such demands on its members. Maybe the CIA would have, though.
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This next case study / example concerns certain aspects of the recruitment process of Procter and Gamble; the details aren't relevant to my experience with the Vienna mission, but the concluding statements are:
"Notwithstanding the intensity of this screening process, the recruiting team strives diligently to avoid overselling P&G, revealing both its plusses and minuses. P&G actually facilitates an applicant's de-selection, believing that no one knows better than the candidate whether the organization meshes with his or her own objectives and values." (p. 27)
On one hand this recruiting mind-set might have proved valuable in averting a catastrophe (my landing in an almost completely ill-fitted position within an ill-fitting organization), but on the other hand this would be an impossible tack for the mission to take. It should be clear by now what I mean by avoiding a catastrophe, but the second half of this sentence could bear some fleshing out. The issue, of course, is why couldn't it take such an approach to recruitment?
The reason is, in my opinion, that to reveal the "minusses" would be akin to organizational suicide. To reveal the minusses, the mission would have had to reveal these aspects of the mission to the front line recruiters in the 15 missions that make up the mission; after all, it was these missions that would be doing the initial recruiting and that had the face-to-face contact with applicants. A good chunk of these missions worked on standard mission settings (i.e., non-'closed countries') and might not be so versed in the unique mindset that had developed in East European missions. So in this need-to-know culture of East European missions, you'd have a new whole big (and disparate and widely dispersed) class of people who would be in a need-to-know position regarding issues probably viewed (more or less) as organizational secrets. The whole need-to-know concept, at least in this context, is based on security concerns, so this would have not only massive p.r. implications but would also compromise security, not just of the mission itself but also, potentially, each of the 15 composite missions, some of whom focused solely on Eastern European ministry.
In this manner, it becomes clear that facilitating an applicant's deselection by revealing "minuses" along with the "plusses," would have been nigh impossible for the Vienna mission. This becomes even more important if you consider that possibility that my intention to work in Eastern Europe could have been hampered by my father's work as a program manager in Boeing's Strategic Defense Initiative line of work. It may have been difficult to directly hinder my entrance into full-time East European ministry. It is more likely that the U.S. government might have clout with East European missions than with those on the hiring end of things, who may have not been East European ministry insiders. I'm not saying that my work was in fact affected by my father's work, just that if it was it might have been harder to have influence on the hiring end of things.
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I'm going to end here for this post to get on with my day. Thanks for sharing part of your day with me.
~ Meg
