Part of the definition of "Greek tragedy" involves, usually some kind of flaw(s) in the protagonist's character. Unfortunately for me, I have multiple such flaws that might lend themselves well to a Greek tragedy type life, given the right circumstances, of course. So it's time to start presenting little snippets of my character, at least how I see myself. And since this is an autobiography how I see myself is pertinent content matter.
***
One thing about myself is, I think, I never have learned how to defend myself very well, although sometimes I do okay at it.
Growing up I don't remember situations where I particularly had to defend myself too much. I didn't have a sister and my brothers were too busy defending each other (against others) or fighting with each other to get in my way at all. And I didn't really have any enemies that I can recall. I did get the usual teasing when I got braces in 6th grade, but I was fortunate to have them on young enough that I wasn't super image conscious yet, so it didn't affect me that much.
My brothers did learn do defend themselves physically, and were given some assistance with this by dad, so that they could deal with teasers and other boys who wanted to pick fights.
Heck, I wasn't even very competitive... I remember in casual games of volleyball, such as with the church youth group, thinking how silly it was for someone to get all bent out of shape about whether a ball was in or out of bounds, especially since it was just a game for fun. Needless to say, however, the world isn't always a friendly place and if someone isn't competitive and doesn't really know how to defend herself, it can end out being downright... well, tragic (as in Greek tragedy).
I also don't have much of a temper, although I think in recent years I may have become less forgiving and quicker to get irritated. But I did somehow learn that if I was going to get angry, I should have all my ducks in a row and just lay everything out on the line. One example of this happened the summer after I graduated from high school.
I had been working at KMart (a discount department store chain) part-time during my senior year of school, but was able to work there full-time in the summer between high school and my freshman year of college. I worked in the back of the store in the garden shop, hardware and building supplies. But for that summer while I was full-time I was given two small departments (I was the only worker in them): pictures and pets. Pictures is pretty self-explanatory but pets did not include live animals, just supplies for them. It was my responsibility to make sure the shelves were well stocked and neat, that the end displays and sale signs were changed according to schedule, and ordering stock. I was also the person that got called to help customers with questions about anything in these department if I was on shift at the time.
But since this wasn't enough to keep me busy full-time I also helped out a lot in the other departments I'd worked in before, and my departments were right next to them, so it was convenient too. Being summer you can imagine that garden shop, hardware and building supplies were all very busy. Randy, the garden shop manager had repeatedly asked me to help him when it was unreasonable for me to leave my department, but I tried to accommodate him as much as possible. Randy was probably 10 or 20 years my senior in age and also had much more experience than me at the store.
But one day we were both in the back room where the ordering books were (this was before widespread use of computers) and the only person there was the marketing manager, the second in command for the whole store. While there Randy asked again for me to go help him in garden shop. I don't remember exactly what I had to do, but I responded to him in a calm but firm voice detailing all the times he'd asked me and how I'd bent over backward to accommodate him but I couldn't let my department suffer. When I was done neither he nor the marketing manager said anything and that was the end of that, because it was clear that I was right.
I tell you this to demonstrate how there might be a precedent that I don't demonstrate anger until I have a lot of evidence and can lay it all on the line. But maybe this incident also demonstrates my sense of time and place, because this was away from where customers, for example, could have heard what was going on. And here I was a little 18 year old upstart pipsqueak telling a major department head off in front of second most senior manager of the fairly large store!
Maybe I feel like I'm doing that a little now regarding the Vienna mission. When I get past the Vienna years, though, it'll be a whole different scenario. But sometimes as I write these text discussions like maybe it's overkill, but I do think that I'm still coming up with new insights, so as long as I feel that there's useful insights coming out of it, I'll keep going. I'm not responding to all the articles in this file though, because I don't think they all offer anything new.
Another example of standing up for what I believed in was when I made the appointment with the director of a very influential Eastern European mission (for whom I was working part-time) to discuss some concerns I had with him. I felt my concerns were well enough founded (both from my having developed deeply held general convictions and also from what I had learned specifically about the mission itself) that I could request such a meeting. The situation was a lot different in Vienna though, and I never really considered doing anything like this there.
Anyway, back to my character flaw, I don't know if things would have turned out differently in Vienna if I'd had better confrontation skills or skills in defending and standing up for myself, but at certain points in the chronology it may have been wiser to not go along with the mission, so this would have been a kind of fatal flaw (in the Greek tragedy sense) on my part. But standing up for myself would undoubtedly have meant leaving the mission, which would have been difficult for me too.
(The two above examples of standing up for myself stick out as being unusual in my life, but they do show that given the right circumstances I could do it. I think after my Vienna experiences it became even harder for me to effectively stand up for myself, because of how I'd changed through them.)
***
This next journal article is as follows:
Buchanan, II, Bruce. (1974, Dec.). Building organizational commitment: the socialization of managers in work organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 19(4), 533-546.
***
After giving examples of the range of views regarding what "commitment" is the author lays out his use of the term for the purposes of this study:
"The concept employed in this study resembles those surveyed. Commitment is viewed as a partisan, affective attachment to the goals and values of an organization, to one's role in relation to goals and values, and to the organization for its own sake, apart from its purely instrumental worth. Methodologically, commitment consists of three components, each of which is measured with an independent series of questionnaire items... These are (a) identification - adoption as one's own the goals and values of the organization, (b) involvement - psychological immersion or absorption in the activities of one's work role, and (c) loyalty - a feeling of affection for and attachment to the organization." (p. 533)
I had problems with the mission's values, but I hadn't foreseen that before coming, so when it began to seem clear that there was this difference it served to put a distance between me and the mission; that is I became distanced from the mission (not the other way around) as a result of this realization.
I think I had an affective enough attachment to my role as a secretary in the organization, but not to the extent, as I've said before, that it defined my every step. It's possible that forcing that enlarged nature of the secretarial role on me might have weakened my otherwise reasonably positive attachment to the role as a position in the organization.
There was never a problem, I don't think, with my valuing the mission instrumentally - for the work it did and for the opportunity to work with it. But if I ever did value it for its own sake, my experiences in Vienna after I arrived pretty well killed that attitude.
***
"Kantor (1968) argued that different aspects of commitment are elicited by different behavioral requirements imposed on community members. Thus, continuance commitment, defined as member dedication to system survival, was stimulated by requiring personal investments and sacrifices of members, such that it was costly and difficult for them to leave. Cohesion commitment, defined as member attachment to the social relationships which comprise the community, was secured by such techniques as verbal public renunciation of previous social ties and engaging in ceremonies which enhanced the sense of group cohesion and belonging. Control commitment, conceived as attachment to norms which shape behavior in desired directions, was encouraged by requiring members to publicly disavow previous norms and to reformulate their self-conceptions in terms of system values." (p. 534)
I think that continuance commitment was fundamental in the Vienna mission in as much as security concerns were so pervasive. (Although, as they became second nature I think people got used to them and maybe even became less conscious of them except in particular contexts.) This type of commitment was mandated for everyone, I think. If you didn't have it you'd have problems working there.
It's hard for me to say that cohesion commitment might have been any less important than continuance commitment, because, to a large extent, it was the cohesion commitment that provided the means of mutual accountability among workers (and family members) regarding their continuance commitment. Also, any lack of cohesion amongst members could become a potential security risk.
If you didn't have control commitment in the Vienna mission, I don't know how you'd know how to act in various situations. And if the mission suspected that, as in my case, you weren't buying into the group norms, you wouldn't have been properly socialized, for one thing. It was unacceptable to the mission to have workers who did not have full buy-in to the organization's values, or at the very least trusted the mission completely to go along with them. Eventually it became clear (to me at least) that I did neither (trust them nor buy in to their values).
[4/8/11 comment: By the end of my time with the mission I had no continuance commitment (because I thought that the mission in many ways might be doing more harm than good because of its modus operandi), no cohesion commitment (because I didn't want to become a part of the in-group because of the values differences), and no control commitment (because I thought the group needed more accountability which would mean more exposure of how it really operated which thinking was diametrically opposed to what control commitment would mean in that context).]
***
"Influence susceptibility stages, however, are skewed toward the early career years in keeping with the focus of this study on the inculcation of commitment, as contrasted with its maintenance at labor career stages. It is during the early career years that susceptibility to influence is greatest and attitudes toward the organization will be shaped." (p. 535)
I'm not sure how the mission viewed vis a vis my experience or lack of it. Them setting me up so totally as a secretary would argue for them not taking into account a lot of my education and experiences. It's possible they did have more of a knowledge of my background then they let on to having, but they mustn't have known that I had more or less passed the vulnerable early years stage in regards to theological issues and also East European missions. I think they probably assumed two types of new recruits, in this regard: those who had experience in East European missions and had already been socialized and accepted East European mission values and norms (although there was some variation between missions) or were new to this area of work and therefore very impressionable. As usual, I didn't fit either of these bills, because I wasn't green, but I also hadn't accepted the norms and values of mission to that part of the world. In other words, I disagreed with them (although I didn't know that before arriving there) and also knew enough to be dangerous.
***
This next section is called "The First Year."
"Hall and Nougaim (1968) contended that the primary concern of those at this career stage is safety: getting established with and accepted by the organization." (p. 535)
It feels strange to say this, but this does not fit how I felt in Vienna in the first year. I did want to get established with the organization, so that's no problem. But I never thought that safety (job security?) would be an issue, although it didn't take all that long to realize my position in the organization was not a given. And being accepted by the organization was also not a major concern for me. I didn't have any concerns that I couldn't do the work and I was certainly amicable and interested in getting involved in the life of the mission and took initiative to instigate outings, social meetings and the like. But I don't think I ever was concerned about being accepted by the organization; that wasn't high on my radar. The over-riding that sort of eclipsed all of these other new recruit concerns was the shock of finding the values differences and the things I was witnessing and experiencing. So that ended out overshadowing any other concerns I might have had about my relationship with the mission.
***
I'm skipping several issues one might expect to experience one's first year on the job, and going right to the last one:
"A final category of experiences is likely to be specially important to first-year managers. The category might be termed loyalty conflicts. Its significance stems from the fact that many recruits are torn between learning and surrender to the new environment on the one hand and suspicion and mistrust of it on the other. Thus, an early concern of many will be to sense whether the organization is trying to dominate them, and subvert their individuality through substitution of organizational for personal values... To the extent that recruits feel threatened or compromised, commitment will probably be undermined." (p. 536)
Needless to say I felt very threatened (by possible and real negative repercussions) and compromised (in as much as my values were at variance with the mission's). And I think that this is a pretty good succinct summary of how my commitment to the mission came to be undermined.
I think the Vienna mission normally didn't have to worry too much about "suspicion and mistrust of it" because of the high regard missionary work has in the Evangelical Christian church setting. I do find it a little strange that none of the new theologians seemed to have a problem with the mission values, but I've discussed this elsewhere, so I won't belabor it again here.
I'm a bit ambivalent about the sentence about feeling like the organization is "trying to dominate them, and subvert their individuality through a substitution of organizational for personal values." On one hand, it's comforting to know that this sense is somewhat normal. But on the other hand, I don't think the Buchanan was particularly thinking of Evangelical Christian total institutions located thousands of miles away from members' homes. In that (the Vienna mission) context these words taken on a whole new meaning and impetus. In other words, the mission not only could seem to do these things, but very likely could actually do them to a rather large extent. Maybe one reason it was more feasible for me to try to withstand "challenges to, or attempts to change, ego-related attitudes" was because I was comfortable enough in the Austrian world that the mission didn't have me cornered. Eventually, though, if this helped empower me to avoid succumbing, eventually, I think, it backfired. But since a big part of why I was getting out into the Austrian world was because of my discontent at being limited to secretarial work, it wasn't a ploy, and so did play an important role in my life while in Vienna and I couldn't have stopped such activities without great damage to my self-identity. Towards the end of my time with the mission I did, as I've already said, begin to curtail these outside activities but doing so was both a result of not being able to withstand the pressure any more and also fed into my crumbling self-image.
***
I'm going to end there. I didn't notice the time and that it's already 1:00 a.m.!
