Jumping right into the text... We're in a section of the chapter called "Four Approaches to Organizational Culture" and a sub-section titled "Culture as Shared Norms, Beliefs and Values."
"Based on their research, Deal and Kennedy provide a typology of organizational cultures. There is the tough guy, macho culture or organizations in which like to take high risks and get quick feedback on whether their actions are right or wrong. Examples include police departments or hospitals, where the stakes are life and death, or professional sports, where the financial stakes are high. There are work-hard, play-hard cultures, in which fun and action are the rule and employees take few risks. Sales organizations, including door-to-door sales businesses, and the sales departments in most organizations exemplify this culture. Bet-your-company cultures are those in which big-stakes decisions are made but years pass before employees know whether those decisions were right or wrong. These are high-risk, slow-feedback environments. Oil companies, dependent on large and long-term investment for explorations, are such cultures. Finally, there are process cultures, in which there is little or not feedback and employees find it difficult to measure what they do, concentrating instead on how it's done. Banks, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical firms are examples. Recently, an argument has been put forth that there is good reason for some ambiguity in meaning and for using images with multiple meanings because this allows employees to interpret meaning in the light of their own motives." (p. 123; bold in the original)
I think the only one of these cultural types that might fit how I understood and experienced the Vienna mission is the "process culture" category. The over-riding reason I would peg the mission thus is its all-pervasive focus on security issues. But also, although we did get a steady feed of stories of accomplishments in large group meetings and the like, and we also told our own such stories via our prayer letters, it wasn't like we'd find out about victories like winning a game or realized the decision to teach in Romania was paying off (and I'm referring here to what would be needed to fit into some of the other categories in this text). Our stories were things like news that a recent teaching trip was successful and maybe something that specifically stood out in it, or news that another textbook had been completed and was ready for the press, that kind of thing. So it had to be a process culture if anything.
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"An interesting application of the notion of shared norms and values involves occupational communities (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984). We usually describe occupations with terms such as engineer, mechanic, librarian, and so on, but these static descriptions fail to orient us to dynamic meaning of work to people in particular jobs. In some jobs people leave social interactions and their own values outside when they walk into their organizations. But other jobs lay on their practitioners a whole set of cognitive, social, and moral meanings. For these jobs the idea of occupational community is relevant.
[An occupational community is] a group of people who consider themselves to be engaged in the same sort of work; whose identity is drawn from the work; who share with one another a set of values, norms and perspectives that apply to but extend beyond work related matters; and whose social relationships meld work and leisure... Occupational communities are seen to create and sustain relatively unique work cultures consisting of, among other things, task rituals, standards for proper and improper behavior, work codes surrounding relatively routine practices and, for the membership at least, compelling accounts attesting to the logic and value of these rituals, standards and codes (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984, p. 287)" (p. 123)
I find the idea of occupational community in the context of the Vienna mission a somewhat intriguing one, but I can't say I speak here with a great sense of certainty in this regard. As I see it, there would be two possible major "occupational communities" that might be relevant to the work in Vienna, and those were the missionary and the Christian seminary/religion/theology professor communities. I believe there would have been enough identity that when needed individuals could hobnob within these communities, and I think that the latter community may have impacted the broader culture of the Vienna mission, but I think for the most part these were mostly left at the door and the Vienna mission provided all the identity they needed and/or were allowed to have. In any case, I doubt that any possible conflict between occupational community and organizational culture and responsibilities would have been permitted, and so, in this way, any occupational community attachments would have had to have been secondary to the mission's demands and culture. I expect that if this is so at least some of the theologians on staff would be able and willing to vouch for this, because it may well have been a bone of contention to them, although one they must have somehow learned to live with.
The missionary community, however is another animal all together. Generally speaking, those who came to the mission from a background of previous full-time mission work came from work with other East European missions. So their affiliation with missions as a whole, other than from their theological training and teaching back home vis a vis missions and missiology, would not be that great. They wouldn't need to be re-socialized, for example, from church-planting work in Japan or Bolivia, for example. So I suspect that the only way the professional missions work or missiology studies communities might have had any bearing on the Vienna mission wold be via the community of East European missions practitioners (rather than Eastern European missiology professors and researchers). It's possible that even with my limited background I might have been the only one on staff that would have fit the latter group, and that would have just been via my somewhat limited research background of the subject. I don't know, for example, that anyone on staff had participated in research, publishing, teaching or conference presentations on missions in Eastern Europe.
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"According to Martin et al., seven kinds of stories exist across a variety of kinds of organizations:
1. Stories that describe how organizations treat status considerations when rules are broken. Such stories tell about how a high-status person breaks a rule and is confronted by a lower-status person who attempts to enforce the rule. The high-status person may become angry, conform to the rule, disregard the low-status person, or take some other action." (p. 125)
I'm going to take these one by one to make it more manageable. But I should also state from the outset that while I think these (or at least some of these) "stories" did exist in the Vienna mission, I think they were only shared among insiders, and mostly on a one to one basis. As such I didn't have access to very many of these at all, so my discussion has to be from that very limited vantage point.
I don't know of any stories about when status and broken rules, but this does raise an interesting question about what might have happened if I had pursued more vehemently a couple of issues the management denied to grant me my rights that I should have been able to do according to their own written policies.
The first one was when I asked about being given time off from work to study German, which, again, I was supposed to be granted. It was something like 1 month for every 1 year of service commitment, which should have allowed me 2 months off for this study. When I asked about this I was told that they don't usually do that and that there is so much work to do that it's hard to have someone away for so long. That sounded reasonable, so I didn't fight it. But then they had me spend the next two months, rather infamously by now (that is if you don't know about it, you're very new to this blog) reading software manuals for the next 2 months.
This right here has the potential of telling me several things about the mission. First of all, they can and do lie (i.e., there was not "such a lot of work [for me] to do"). Secondly, they practice what political scientists and lawyers call "legal nihilism". And, thirdly, it seemed that there seemed to be rules other than those on paper that guided how the organization operated, and those other rules seemed to carry more weight than the written ones.
The other situation in which I requested something that was likewise in that same written handbook that explained the usual organizational rights and responsibilities that you might expect in an employee handbook for an overseas Christian mission; namely, I requested a couple days off to be with a supporter & friend who was visiting me from the States. The handbook said quite explicitly that we were to be given a limited amount of time off to spend with supporters specifically. That is not for other visitors, only for visitors that were also financial supporters. And the clincher was that, in contrast to the German study provision, other people at the mission were in fact granted this right.
I had two friends coming to visit me and one was a supporter, but neither had been abroad before and so were a bit apprehensive about getting around on their own. But the mission would not let me have any time off even after I told them about one being a supporter and pointed out the written provision. What I learn from this is: 1) they practice what political scientists and lawyers call "legal nihilism"; 2) it seemed that there seemed to be rules other than those on paper that guided how the organization operated, and those other rules seemed to carry more weight than the written ones; and 3) there was some reason that I was not granted this right when others would, which would seem to support the hypothesis that I was for some reason in the doghouse by virtue of "the stick" or "negative punishment" being applied (via withholding of a written right other were granted).
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I have to, believe it or not, get to some other things. I do spend a lot of time working on this though.
