Speaking tongue-in-cheek runs the risk of readers not taking me seriously in other discussions (where I'm being dead serious), but I think that sometimes, as long as the bounds are clear, humor has it's place and can even serve a useful purpose, so I'm going to (and have already) include this kind of thing from time to time as these things come to me. Here's one of of these situations:
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It has been said that to have a successful democracy it is imperative to have an educated public. (Cp., for example this reference to the Jefferson and Madison Letters). Nevertheless, politicians have repeatedly reverted to addressing the lowest common denominator of public intelligence.
Not to be outdone, the Communists similarly determined that an educated public was necessary to the operation of an effective Communist state. (Cp. "The Communist View of Education" here.)
Despite such heady pontifications, both types of regimes have not infrequently seemed to address the lowest common denominator vis a vis level of intelligence and education in their respective publics. Whether this was due to a sense that the education system had somehow failed resulting in the necessity of addressing them this way or whether it was to augment otherwise effective education and adequate intelligence (adequate for purposes of running a well-greased democratic or communistic country anyway), or for both reasons, each country has reverted to sloganeering, which often requires little education and not necessarily very high intelligence. Here are some examples:
"Comrade Lenin will clean the world of filth!"
"Day after day life becomes happier!"
"In step working men and women - your alliance is unbeatable!"
"We bring fear to the bourgeoisie!"
"Here's our profit!"
Or...
"Prosperity for American families!" (Al Gore, 2000)
"Yes, America can!" (George W. Bush, 2004)
"Yes, we can!" (Barack Obama, 2008)
"Patriotism, Protection, and Prosperity" (William McKinley, 1896)
"54-40 or fight!" (James K. Polk, 1844)
(The first group of slogans are from Soviet era posters, and the second group are U.S. presidential campaign slogans.)
Now the reader could read these slogans and immediately come to a conclusion about the speaker's opinion about the intended audience's intelligence, and with a trained mind perhaps a valid qualitative interpretation could be drawn. However, I have in this instance opted for a quantitative analysis, as follows:
I tallied the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score for each of the above slogans to determine how intelligent Soviet and U.S. officials viewed their respective audiences. I must give a disclaimer here that the sampling was not random, but purposeful. However, said purpose did not include consideration about reader level, but only about content.
Another limitation in this unscientific study is that I can't vouch for the generalizability of the findings, due to both the lack of random sampling and also the small size of the sample. And it's quite possible that the two samples (the 2 sets of slogans) are not totally comparable in nature. Also, the results do not necessarily bear any resemblance to the actual intelligence of the intended audiences, only to the presumed audience intelligence by those using the slogans. (Another possible interpretation, however, is that the reading level of each slogan is indicative of the reading level of the producers of these slogans.) It should also be noticed that reading levels were based on English versions, which may have biased the USSR slogans one way or the other. Further research is advised in order to validate these findings and possibly extend them to other types of communication, for example.
Here are the results of my tallies; the numbers indicate the (U.S.) grade reading proficiency level of the slogan:
Group 1 (USSR)
2.28
6.456
6.41
2.454
2.444
[Mean: 4.0088; Median: 2.454]
Group 2 (USA)
21.37
9.18
(-2.62)
21.37
0.72
[Mean: 10.004; Median: 9.18]
No matter how you cut it, U.S. propaganda comes out on a more educated reading level than the Soviet propaganda. However, it might be informative to look at these in a historical sequence, in which case the most recent U.S. sample, which earned a -2.62 reading level rating, raises some serious concerns. It appears that that slogan was addressed to an audience at the pre-school reading level.
Since the numbers in this sample were so small I didn't bother to calculate the standard deviation, but if these figures are at all representative of the total universe of phenomena they represent (which is not extremely likely), then it might be interesting to include such analysis in a larger study.
If you like you can check my findings and do the calculations yourself using the formula provided at the above link.
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NOTE!!! THIS ENDS THE TONGUE-IN-CHEEK SECTION. THE REMAINDER OF THIS POST IS WRITTEN IN COMPLETE EARNESTNESS!!! DO NOT CONFUSE THESE TWO MODES OF WRITING!!!!
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Back to the text...
"Americans, dedicated by constitution and conviction to the full expression of individuality, regard 'socialization' as alien and vaguely sinister." (p. 27)
My first (of 2) refereed journal articles makes reference to this cultural sense of individuality. I won't say that the Vienna mission suppressed individuality, and I don't know if anyone else there ever reacted as I did, but I suppose my sense of individuality could have played some part in my reaction. Maybe it provided a basis for me feeling that I had a right to determine right and wrong on my own, or at least not be forced into any changes in that regard. The issue of right and wrong came in to play for me because I had values and beliefs that seemed to differ from those of the mission.
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"I believe that management education, particularly graduate (business schools), are increasingly attempting to train professionals, and in this process are socializing the students to a set of professional values which are, in fact, in a severe and direct conflict with typical organizational values." (p. 28).
It's possible that the theologians had somehow been socialized in their theological studies in such a way that made fitting in with the Vienna mission easier. In my Bible school studies I didn't notice this kind of socialization. I did experience it, however, later on in my doctoral studies (which I never finished).
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Speaking, again, of Americans...
"The crux of the dilemma is this: We are intellectually and culturally opposed to the manipulation of individuals for organizational purposes." (p. 28)
Some might call this social engineering, and I, generally, don't like it, but it depends on how it's done and what the issues are. In the Vienna case there were some pretty serious (to me) issues involved, which precluded me being able to conform, and it appeared that change would only happen unidirectionally - that is, them affecting me and not the other way around.
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Next, the author tries to explain how managers can effect socialization given the American cultural aversion to that kind of thing, trying to navigate between extreme individualism and extreme conformity.
"Step One: Careful selection of entry-level candidates... Never oversell a new recruit. Rely heavily on the informed applicant deselecting himself if the organization doesn't fit with his personal style and values." (p. 29)
Well, if said applicant had been more informed about the socialization process it is possible that she could have deselected herself. (That would be me, of course, I'm referring to there.) However, the mission was not going to come clean with all its socialization processes (which it would invariably deny existed at all). So that left the applicant to take the mission at face value... which I continued to do until the day I left the mission...
Come to think of it, though, this does raise an interesting question. The mission would not admit to having these kinds of socialization efforts going on and I also acted as if that were the case, and what did we get? I think that if they had been straight with me the whole time then my upfront responses to interaction with them should have indicated growing mutual understanding and cooperation, right? But if the mission is lying and they do have these socialization efforts going on, then that would explain why my responding to them in an explicit direct way led to the demise it did.
[4/15/2011 Note: I think this is very important and needs fleshing out, or at least clarifying, a bit, so I'll try to rephrase it. I responded to what I perceived to be the mission's explicit communication. If the mission's explicit meaning was what the mission was trying to communicate, then we should have had successful communication interaction, right? But... on the other hand, if what the mission really intended to communicate to me was some implicit message, then successful communication would not have happened, right? Because I was responding to an explicit message, but the mission was really sending an implicit message. Let me give a foreign language example of how this might work, although the mechanism of misunderstanding is different in this example.
The Russian word "Dom" (дом) is usually translated in Russian-English dictionaries as "house." (You can try this yourself by copying the Russian word and pasting it into the appropriate box in the "Russian-English dictionaries" link and doing the translation.) When I was in Russia, though, I found that "дом" really meant "apartment building" and what I think of as "house" in English they would call either "chastnyi dom" (частный дом) or "kottedzh" (коттедж). So it would be like me talking to Russians about "doma" (plural for "dom") and thinking "house," but them thinking in terms of "apartment building."
Again, the type of misunderstanding is not the same in the Russian "dom" situation and the implicit/explicit communications of the mission, but the idea is that both parties are working from different understandings of what is really being said, what is really meant.
If my understanding of "dom" as "house" had been correct, it should not surprise me when the individual took me to his/her "dom" that is an apartment building. Likewise, if my understanding of the mission's communications with me had been accurate, shared understandings should have led to successful interactions, which wasn't the case in my overall experience with them.]
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"Step Two: Humility-inducing experiences in the first months on the job precipitate self-questioning of prior behavior, beliefs, and values. A lowering of individual self-comfort and self-complacency promotes openness toward accepting the organization's norms and values.
Most strong culture companies get the new hire's attention by pouring on more work than can possibly be done... Procter and Gamble achieves the same result via "upending experience," sometimes requiring a new recruit to color in a sales territory map - a task for which the novitiate is clearly overqualified. These experiences convey a metamessage: "While you're smart in some ways, you're in kindergarten as far as what you know about this organization." (p. 30)
Debasement by any other name is still debasement. It's clear that the mission used the second approach with me. But the thing was, and you should have caught this by now if you've been reading along, that I never really let anything get to me, I wasn't needy, I was amenable to whatever they asked, probably to a fault. They couldn't find a hook to reel me in. I think that after being in the States a few months, though, they thought I'd finally capitulated, and they brought me back to Vienna going on that assumption (because I'd proven myself docile enough in Dallas).
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I'm going to end here for now. One of my neighbors had a death in the family and has a lot of visitors, so I thought I'd bake some cookies to bring over.
