Going back to where I left off at the end of the last post, it really is hard to believe that such highly educated people (all with graduate degrees), people whose education more than likely included some coursework in counseling and/or psychology could have really confused the terms "reality shock" and "culture shock." I have a hard time believing they really thought I had culture shock in the usual use of the term. But even if I did, that doesn't explain their approach to helping me. If they thought I had culture shock (which the head of H.R. explicitly told me I had and had a research article with a graph showing the various phases of cultural adjustment, similar to what the last articles described), there are a lot better (more effective, more constructive) ways they could have tried to help me. But I don't believe it was their intent to help me any more than they really believed I had culture shock.
***
This next journal article is:
Black, J. Stewart, Mendanhall, Mark, & Oddou, Gary. (1991). Toward a comprehensive model of international adjustment: an integration of multiple theoretical perspectives. Academy or Management Review, 16(3), 291-317.
I'm not sure how these culture shock articles got in the socialization file, but I'm not going to bother to move them. It's probably a good idea, anyway, to begin looking at this topic. This article deals with adjusting to an overseas job, so it is very pertinent to socialization. This is a meta-review article, meaning it tries to tie together relevant findings from the extant literature.
***
The first major section is titled: "Review of the International Adjustment Literature."
"These and other studies that had slightly less rigorous designs found support for a positive relationship between cross-cultural training and cross-cultural adjustment, cross-cultural skill development and job performance. They concluded their review of the literature by stating: 'Thus, the empirical literature gives guarded support to the proposition that cross-cultural training has a positive impact on cross-cultural effectiveness (Black & Mendenhall, 1990:120)." (p. 293)
I don't know what kind of "cross-cultural training" was considered in those studies, but I had a fair amount of formal and nonformal learning experiences (cp. Wikipedia for formal, nonformal & informal learning), such as a B.A. in European Studies and Grundstufe II studies at the Berlin Goethe Institut. I suspect that the researchers' standard for what constituted "cross-cultural training" was significantly less than what I had. Thus, I should have had a pretty good chance of having "cross-cultural effectiveness." (p. 293). I think I had more of this kind of training than anyone else at the mission, in any event; no one else had a any kind of a culture-related degree as far as I knew.
***
That was the "Predeparture Training" sub-section, now we move on to "Previous Overseas Experience."
"Church (1982: 549) found in his review of the empirical literature in this area that 'empirical findings support the importance of accurate prior cultural experience or prior exposure... for sojourner adjustment.'" (p. 293)
My European overseas experience, prior to arriving in Vienna goes like this:
Sept. 1981: Member of a sister-city delegation to Nantes, France
Sept. 1981 to Dec. 1981: European quarter abroad, with one month in Louvain/Leuven, Belgium, another month in Heppenheim, Germany and travels with the group as a whole as well as weekend trips in small groups
Dec. 1981: Moscow winter inter-rim course
Dec. 1981 to Jan. 1982: A friend and I trying to leave the USSR because our travel agent bought us train tickets out through Poland when we'd explicitly asked for Romania and NOT Poland; Martial law was declared in Poland Dec. 13, while we were in Moscow and we didn't know what was going on. Then we wind our way up from Budapest (we were finally sent through Hungary), Zagreb, Pula (now in Croatia), Venice, Avignon, Dover, and London, from where we flew home.
June to Aug. 1983: Summer ministry to Eastern Europe; stationed outside Vienna
Aug. 1983: several days with a missionary couple to East Europeans in Hamburg
Sept. to Oct. 1983: Berlin, where I studied German, volunteered at the Bethel Diakoniewerke, attended a German Frei Evangelische Kirche, made friends via repeat visits to seminary in East Berlin, went on a 500 year anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther tour, and made another trip into East Germany to attend a Lutheran youth rally
Nov. to Dec. 1983: volunteered at a research center dedicated to religion in Eastern Europe.
The point is that I had lots of fairly recent experience (recent from the standpoint of when I was working in Vienna) in Europe, including a lot of it where I got around on my own without any problems. So this is another reason my adjustment to live in Vienna should have been relatively easy. Not only did I have just any old "overseas experience," but I had a fair amount of experience in Vienna and other German speaking countries.
***
The next sub-section is: "Organizational Selection Criteria and Mechanisms".
"Many researchers have noted that American MNCs [multinational corporations], despite the evidence that a variety of skills are necessary for success in an overseas assignment, focus only on one selection criterion: technical competence." (p. 294)
Say WHAT!? Technical competence? Then how did I get to Vienna? I wasn't even a professional secretary! (but neither was the gal straight out of high school either, and this might tell you what the mission leadership thought of secretaries - that preparation was optional because it wasn't important and/or not needed.) Since the mission did everything they could to reign in my use of my previous cross-cultural training and experience, I assume that that wasn't important to them either, which makes me wonder why they even offered me the job in the first place? Exactly what criteria DID they use, if not technical competence or cross-cultural competence? Of course, there was the issue of being a Christian and theological compatibility. Maybe that was the only criteria they used to select me. (I doubt that this was the only criteria, but lacking other information, it's the only one I can be relatively certain about.)
At any rate, it seems that cross-cultural skill was not in the purview of the mission vis a vis "selection criteria and mechanisms."
***
The next sub-section is titled "Individual Skills".
"Many researchers have investigated the skills necessary for an executive to be effective in a cross-cultural setting... These skills have been categorized by Mendenhall and Oddou (1985) into three dimensions: (1) the self-dimension, which encompasses skills that enable the expatriate to maintain mental health, psychological well-being, self-efficacy, and effective stress management; (2) the relationship dimension, which constitutes the array of skills necessary for the fostering of relationships with host nationals; and (3) the perception dimension, which entails the cognitive abilities that allow the expatriate to correctly perceive and evaluate the host environment and its actors." (p. 294)
I'll take these dimensions one by one:
1) I really, really needed better stress management skills in Vienna, but not because of the Austrians; rather the expat missionaries I worked with were the problem. But, yes, I was very much in need of better stress management skills.
2) I think I had good relationships with the Austrians I got to know. I was limited in how much I could foster those relationships, though, because of pressures from the mission to be more controllable (that's how it felt).
3) I had no problem perceiving and evaluating the Austrian environment and its actors; what I did have problems with is perceiving and evaluating the mission environment and its actors. How can I not understand my own country men? Right now I'm the only white person in an African-American setting and I understand these people better than I understood the mission and its people! And they were all White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants like me!
***
The last subsection I'm going to address is called: "Nonwork Factors"
"The first nonwork factor that the empirical literature suggests is important to international adjustment is culture toughness. Some countries' cultures seem to be more difficult to adapt to than others... the more culturally distant or different a host culture is from a person's own, the more difficult it is for him or her to adjust." (p. 295)
Let's get this straight: I'm from the United States of America and my native language is English.
There are roughly 6700 languages in the world and languages are often clumped together. Here's a starting point to consider languages of the world. Then look for "Indo-European Languages" and click on it to go to "Germanic Languages", and you will find that among all the thousands of languages and language families, English happens to be a Germanic language, which already right there might give some indication that there might be some similarity between the cultures, or at least more similarity than between, say, English and Russian, for example.
I know this is silly, but when you have mission leaders who seem to flaunt the obvious, then it behooves me to spell things out very carefully and slowly so they don't miss anything, like the difference between "culture shock" and "reality shock".
***
I'm going to end there for now, but we'll begin another major section of the article next time.
