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But getting back to our text, where I'm in the middle of discussing 7 different types of stories common in organizations.
"5. Stories about whether the company will help an employee who has to move. Such stories are implicit or explicit about the hardship the move will cause and indicate whether the company helps or does nothing for the employee." (p. 125)
I'm not 100% certain I understand this story type. Is it about employees who move to another unit of the company located elsewhere? I guess I'm going to assume that it's a move somehow related to their work with the company, and the hardship, I guess would be things like uprooting one's family and otherwise getting adjusted in the new location.
As far as mission helping with moves, I think the Vienna mission was very good, but there was a lot of coming and going, although probably more coming than going during the time I was there. But I think helping in this way was almost a given and people just did it. For example, when I moved to Vienna a bunch of people help carry the boxes up to my apartment, which was no small feat considering I was in a 7 building complex staggered up a fairly steep hill and I was on the top floor of the top building and you could only drive up to about the 4th or 5th building. So there were a lot of stairs involved there. And they were also very good and making sure I knew the basics of what I needed in order to live there, and I think everyone had about the same experience in this regard.
So, from this standpoint, I'm not sure there would be a story about helping individuals in this way, because it was just sort a part of what you did for each other. Really, they were so much of a family that that was part of the looking out for one another, building camaraderie, etc. I've already talking about a lot of that, but this would be an extension of that kind of thing and mostly just taken for granted, I think, not that people on the recipient end weren't grateful, just that everyone helped out like that wherever they could.
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"6. Stories about how the boss reacts to mistakes. These stories include an employee who makes a mistake and one or more higher-level persons who learn of it. The stories conclude with forgiveness or punishment." (p. 125)
I don't think that this would have been a story type likely to have existed in the Vienna mission at the time I was there. Although, I think the type of "mistake" would make a very large difference in the response type. Any kind of official response would be pretty serious, like a serious reprimand, and others probably knew that if the leadership was involved with kind of rectification of a problem, even if they weren't sure exactly what the problem was, they'd have a sense that something serious was amiss and might even adjust their relations with the person involved according to how the others were. For example, at the end of my time in Vienna I was pretty well ostracized, although I don't think I had really done anything, unless it was just to now completely submit to their authority. That would pretty much be the only thing, I think they could have had against me. There was a lot of other stuff going on too, though, at that time.
Other than such egregious acts of such things as willful insubordination (!), most errors would have generally been handled by anyone witnessing it as soon as there was a reasonable opportunity to do so. The thing was that even though there was a hierarchy, the norms were really the group's norms, so everyone was responsible to everyone else in regards to living by them. Errors would mostly be those of someone who didn't understand a particular norm or application of a norm or maybe just wasn't thinking and did something wrong accidentally. The group wasn't harsh on that kind of thing, but would rather take more of a friendly explanation or perhaps even a nonverbal demonstration to help the person understand the right way of doing things.
In this kind of setting, the only way that this kind of story would probably have happened is if it were to be a kind of warning to anyone thinking about doing something the group considered especially egregious - such as willful insubordination - as to what could happen to you if you committed such a horrendous crime against the group's norms. In this way, as you might have guessed, a story of this king about me might have been told, or maybe even more than one story.
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"7. Stories about how the organization deals with obstacles. These are the most commonly found kinds of organizational stories involving employees at any status level. Attempts are usually made to deal with obstacles, and the stories end when the obstacles are either overcome or it is clear they are insurmountable." (p. 125)
If these stories existed in the Vienna mission, and I'm not sure they did, I suspect it would involve something about the actual work "in-country" (inside one of the Communist Eastern European countries). Things like maybe how a border guard was particularly curious but ended out being foiled and the missionaries got through unscathed, or how a missionary was particularly resourceful at finding a way around some kind of obstacle to the work, things like that might well have become part of the mission's story repertoire. At the larger group meetings we heard reports from teams and work going on that could have turned into repeated stories of this nature.
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This text seems to have a lot of sections worth commenting on, so I may be on it for a while. The next section is titled "Culture as Rites and Ceremonials" and includes another list. We're still in the main section "Four Approaches to Organizational Culture."
"Trice and Beyer identify six kinds of rites in organizations:
"1. Rites of passage show the altering of one's status. A good example of an organizational rite of passage is the events and behaviors involved in induction into the U.S. Army." (p. 127)
The U.S. Army has boot camp, which is a structured socialization setting, and the Vienna mission didn't have anything comparable. But, still, there was socialization even if it was a lot different than boot camp. The only thing that I can think of by way of a "rite of passage" might be being given a significant role in socializing someone else. If there were other such rites I wasn't aware of them.
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"2. Rites of degradation sometimes accompany the removal of high-status people (Garfinkle, 1967). Generally, attention is directed to the person to be removed from office, and his behavior is publicly associated with the problems and failures of the organization. Subsequently, he is removed from office. the impeachment of Richard Nixon was a truncated rite of degradation, cut short by his resignation." (p. 127)
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't what you'd call a "high-status person" at the mission, but I think I was the closest thing they'd ever had to this kind of thing - leaving in a persona non gratis fashion. The only way I could have been considered high-status would have been in relationship to the person who was supposed to be my boss (the assistant director) but half the time wasn't because I was in other positions. As far as rites go, however, I don't know what they did, if anything, that might have been seen as a rite. Certainly, however, they couldn't have blamed any problems the mission might have had on me. However, if I had done something malicious in my willful insubordination, then maybe they would have brought the harm done to the mission issue as well. But I didn't (cause harm) so they didn't (include it in any story they might have told about me).
[4/9/11 comment: By the time I left the mission I had been downgraded to receptionist, so there would have been no way to consider me 'high status' at all at that point. In this way, it's more likely that I would have become a brunt of stories of firings rather than an object of the rite of degradation.]
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"3. Rites of enhancement enhance the status and social identities of people. Public acknowledgement of a promotion would be such a rite." (p. 127)
There were a couple opportunities I had that might have been looked at, at the time, in this way, but later they evidently changed their mind about me and I was demoted again. Those two events were helping out when the board meeting was in Vienna the fall of my second year there. When the board meeting was in town everybody stayed away from the mission during their meetings - part of the need-to-know mentality and security procedures. It wasn't much, really, what my part was, such as helping with refreshments and the like with the other secretaries. But, still, we got to see and sometimes meet the directors, although we weren't in the meetings themselves. Also, I'd been in correspondence with them to make the arrangements so then I could put names with a few faces.
The other thing was the one ministry trip to Eastern Europe that I took, although it was not long before my parents came and after that everything started falling apart for me again, so there's the issue of how much of that was to avoid raising my parents' ire at seeing how they often treated me (moving me around so much, etc.).
Taken on their own, apart from anything else that might have been happening at the same time, these could have been considered rites of enhancements signaling to others that I had reached a certain level of accomplishment within the mission.
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"4. Rites of renewal strengthen existing social structures and thus improve their functioning. Examples of such rites are most organizational development programs, such as management by objectives (MBO) and employee performance evaluations." (p. 127)
I don't know of anything like this in the Vienna mission. If there was anything of this nature there I wasn't aware of it and nor can I imagine how it might have existed based on my knowledge and experience of the mission.
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"5. Rites of conflict reduction resolve the conflicts that inevitably arise among people or groups. Collective bargaining and arbitration are examples." (p. 127)
This didn't happen because conflict didn't happen. If conflict happened the conflicting party would end out more or less like I did. Conflict was not allowed. Period.
The closest thing to conflict would be along the lines of disagreeing about whether the birthday cake should be chocolate or vanilla this month, or whether 10, 531,685 angels could fit on the head of a pin or if there was room for 10,531,686 angels.
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"6. Rites of integration increase the interaction of potentially divergent subsystems with one another during participation in the rite and thus create or revive shared feelings of union and commitment to a larger system. Company Christmas parties and annual picnics are examples of such rites. Graduation ceremonies at Hamburger University serve not only as rites of passage but also as rites of integration." (p. 127)These there were lots and lots of. Here are some examples: monthly "big group" meetings, monthly women's meetings, monthly birthday cakes, singles outings when a single had a birthday, annual retreat, etc., etc.
But this only serves to reinforce what I've been saying all along that unity and camaraderie were of very high importance in the mission. So these rites should not come as a surprise at all at this point.
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That's all for the rites, so I'm going to take another break to do some other things. At least I'm cooled down not from all that pineapple juicing.
