I slept in this morning, but it was too hot to fall asleep right away, so I just got ca. 9 hours sleep. At least I don't have any appointments today to rush off to.
***
I got to thinking that if the Vienna mission wanted to have the "culture shock" card to hold over my head as a threat, then that might also explain why (at least part of "why") they seemed so anxious to cut off my contacts outside the mission. And since this pressure to come totally under the control of the mission and the "culture shock" accusation came so early in my time with the mission, this could by a way my dad's work might have played a part in how I was treated - i.e., not just to keep me in line for the sake of the ministry (or what the mission understood "the ministry" to entail).
That doesn't explain why they would have brought me back to Vienna though after sending me to the States less than a quarter of the way through my term. But since I developed contacts and friends outside of the mission where they sent me to in the States maybe it would have been untenable for them to hold me there (at their U.S. office) indefinitely. Or maybe those who might have had any concern vis a vis my dad's work were satisfied as long as I stayed reined in, as long as I was held on a very tight leash.
If this was the case, then the mission might really have wanted to socialize me and make me a useful member, but there might have been special restrictions place on me because of my father's work, and if I overstepped that line then I became eligible for "special" treatment pertinent to my dad's work over and above anything the mission might have done on its own as part of its usual treatment of its workers.
I don't think I ever thought of this like that, but I woke up this morning with this line of thought... I guess my mind must have kept working while I was asleep or something. I think that this really has a distinct possibility of being about as close to the truth as I've ever come in trying to figure out what was going on in Vienna. If it is an accurate (or relatively accurate) depiction of what was actually happening there, I suspect only very few people would have known about anything related to my dad's work going on in regards to my experience with the mission or, possibly, in Vienna in general.
Also, if my interpretation here is at all accurate, I would expect that some people in the mission might have wondered about how I was being treated and might have had a problem fitting it in with their understanding of how the mission operated; they wondered if there was something going on behind the scenes as to why I was being treated the way it seemed I was being treated or if there was something they otherwise didn't know that would explain it. Old hands might have known well enough to not bother with these things because they were used to segmentation of knowledge in the mission anyway, but that doesn't mean they might not have noticed a difference in my treatment vs. the way things were more usually done or the between how I was treated and their understanding of the norms and values of the mission.
Since I didn't ever have a good grasp concerning what was normative (and when what was normative), it would have been hard for me to discern differences between how I was treated and the mission's norms and usual way of functioning, so I could have inadvertently over-generalized my experiences and observations to explain how things usually were done at the mission. For example, maybe this would explain part of why others might not have seen the mission as so much of a total institution as I did.
However, I really do think that even with these knew insights the mission was still a total institution; it's just possible that my dad's work influenced my experience of the mission to make it seem more of a total institution to me and/or with stronger held boundaries, and/or with a shorter reign than others might have experienced with the mission. Also, if my dad's work played a role in a way I've described here, then there could well have been extra-mission involvement and resources affecting my experiences during my time with the mission, and these extra-mission factors would have come into play when the mission wasn't able to control me well enough to the satisfaction of any external parties concerned about protecting my dad and his work-related knowledge and contacts.
***
Returning to the textual discussion...
The rest of the text is dedicated to pulling together all the relevant research to date (as of 1991, when this article was published) and coming up with a framework from which to suggest needed future research to build on what had already been learned, fill in the gaps and otherwise try to answer remaining unanswered questions.
To get this process started next major section of the article is titled: "Theoretical Framework and Research Agenda."
***
This sub-section is titled: "Facets of Degree of International Adjustment."
"Research in the 1980s (Black, 1988, Black & Stephens, 1989) suggests that there are at least three specific facets of international adjustment: (1) adjustment to work, (2) adjustment to interaction with host nationals, and (3) adjustments to the general environment. Both factor analysis and mean-level differences within subjects regarding these possible facets suggest that international adjustment may not be a unitary construct. Because adjustment appears to be multifaceted, it follows logically that different antecedents to adjustment may have different impacts on each facet of adjustment. There is preliminary evidence that global antecedents are most strongly related to global facets and specific antecedents are most strongly related to specific facets. For example, Black (1988) found that although job variables (e.g., role ambiguity and conflict) were related to work adjustment. They were not related to general adjustment. thus, regarding the various propositions derived from the framework presented, we would expect that the specific variables within the 'job' factors and the 'organizational culture' pared to their relationship with degree of interaction or general adjustment. Likewise, we would expect that the specific variables within the 'nonwork' factors would have their strongest relationship with general and interaction adjustment rather than work adjustment..." (p. 304)
My position, as we've already seen, is that the only area I had trouble adjusting to was work, that is my relationship with the mission, although the mission wanted to prove the exact opposite, or at least that if I had any troubles adjusting it had to include adjustment to "interacting with host nationals" and "adjustment to the general environment." But I think they also wanted to divert attention away from any troubles I might have had adjusting to the work itself and the mission, and this might be supported in their vacuous (I think) expressions of flattery regarding what a good job I was doing. So I think they wanted to actively tried to prove that I was adjusting well to work but not to the other two "facets of international adjustment" - which they would have seen as just one facet (mission adjustment and extra-mission adjustment). In this way the mission would be alleviated of any possible accusation of wrong doing while a satisfactory (to the mission) and credible (to people outside the mission) explanation would be provided that accounted for any troubles I might be having. They also had the advantage, of course, in the credibility arena because they were a mission consisting mostly of theologians and pastors, and so would have had a high credibility rating from both a moral standpoint and by virtue of sheer numbers (60 missionaries against 1 "secretary").
So this brings me back to the position that they wanted to prove the exact opposite of my position, which is that the only problem I had was in adjusting to the work (#1 in this list of 3 spheres of adjustment in the text). I think my dad correctly understood that my position was right when, after I'd returned home from my 2 years in Vienna, he told me (by way of illustrative explanation of my experience) that sometimes people in his work have nervous breakdowns and have to leave and another time by telling me that I was too independent.
The problem, as I see it, however, with my dad's explanation is two-fold. First of all, I think he thought the mission's treatment of me was reasonable and otherwise morally acceptable. I assume that this could be explained in large part because of the line of work he was in, in which he would have had to internalize the morality of this kind of thing, although he didn't apparently distinguish the applicability of it in his line of work (as a defense contractor) vs. my line of work (as a missionary to Eastern Europe). So he applied the same moral grid to both contexts, which is the second problem. This may have been facilitated, at least in part, by the fact that he was very conservative politically (he was an elected local Republican committeeman for several years, for example) and so his thinking may well have been colored by an anti-Communist mentality, although he was definitely otherwise a rational man and not one prone to exaggerations. Still, he would have probably had familiarity with some of the wiles of the Communist enemy, and his enjoyment of spy novels may have fed into this. (He did enjoy other kinds of reading - such as westerns and biographies, but this, I think was one of his favorite genres.) But even if dad had a framework within his fork context for accepting the way the mission treated me, I think he was wrong it applying this framework directly to the Vienna mission, because of the different natures of the organizations. Direct application of that framework to Vienna implied similarities between the mission and dad's work, and I assumed more differences between them. It would be interesting (is that an understatement? i.e., maybe it should be instead "It would be most exceedingly interesting") to really know what similarities there might have been between the two work contexts, but despite whatever similarities there might have been in fact, I still think that the Vienna mission should have been, as an organization, more directly accountable to biblical teaching and as such this should have formed the grounding as to not only its objectives, but also the nature of the organization and how it operated.
So, while my dad did correctly (I think) understand that my problem was with the mission and not (as the mission would have it) with my interactions with Austrians nor the Austrian context in general, he accepted such treatment as acceptable in general (using his own line of work as a comparison) and as morally acceptable (in the mission context in particular). As such, I think he saw me as weak in the sense of not being able to withstand the rigors of the line of work I'd chosen (e.g., missions to Eastern Europe) and the actions of the mission as being a given and acceptable. He seemed to have compared me with others who'd crashed in his line of work.
One of the things I've been wanting to talk about in my pre-ambles (discussions before I start in on the textually-based observations), is my dad and my dad in relationship to me in particular. I may start in on this topic soon. I speak of my father in the past tense because he did a few years ago.
Do you find it at all chilling to think that my dad thought of the Vienna mission in terms of his own work? I know I do. Maybe there's more to those similarities than meets the eye.
***
The discussion in this section continues in the lines of comparing adjustment to new jobs in domestic settings with adjustment to new jobs in international settings.
"...[I]t raises the probability that the different facets of international adjustment could have greater differential influences on outcome variables relative to domestic adjustment.
"For example, general and interaction adjustment might be much stronger predictors of organizational commitment, intent to leave, or turnover in the case of international adjustment versus domestic transitions." (p. 305)
This, of course, is the kind of thing the mission wanted to prove in my case, that it was these international interactions and context issues that was my problem. However, at the end of my time I did get verbal confirmation (from my main secretary-mentor) that it was my lack of submission that was the issue, so they had given up by that point in trying to prove the culture shock explanation, which opens up a whole new can of worms as to why they switched gears and what the implications of that might have been for making sense of my time in Vienna. Here are some of the questions it raises for me:
1. Why did they stop trying to prove I was experiencing culture shock and what significance does the answer to that question have in trying to understand why they used the culture shock explanation in the first place?
2. At what point did they decide that culture shock was not the issue (or not useful as an explanation), but that submission was the problem?
3. What exactly did they want vis a vis submission and why was this submission so important? In what ways was I exhibiting non-submission? What would have satisfied them that I was sufficiently submissive?
4. How do (or might, or should) the answers to these questions affect my understanding of my experiences in Vienna?
I hope you will understand by now that it was very difficult (and still is) to make sense of my time with the Vienna mission, despite the great impact it had on my life. And I hope you will be forgiving of me for having so much trouble in untangling those experiences. It's certainly not for lack of trying that I don't have more definitive answers.
***
I'm going to end here and next time we'll start up again with a new major section of this article.
~ Meg
