This next piece of text is from the sub-section "Culture as Symbolic Interaction." If you do a search of this blog, you'll see that I've addressed symbolic interactionism a couple times already.
"An amalgam of culture as shared norms and values, myths and stories, and rites and ceremonials is achieved by looking at organizations in terms of symbolic interaction (Pfeffer, 1981). From this perspective, managers provide explanations, rationalizations, and legitimation for the activities of the organization. Indeed, one writer sees management essentially as such an activity: 'Managerial work can be viewed as managing myth, symbols, and labels ... Because managers traffic so often in images, the appropriate role for the manager may be evangelist rather than accountant' (Weick, 1979, p. 42). For managers to evangelize, there must be shared norms and values, which are manifested in the myths, rites and ceremonials." (p. 128)
Without comparing this to other potential takes on management, I would say that this view of the management role fits pretty well in the Vienna mission context, as I experienced it. Actually, I'm trying to remember who did the more "accountant" type of work in the mission. I think it probably was mostly handled out of the U.S. office except that the Vienna director's secretary probably took care of the routine expenses in Vienna, such as rent and utilities and the like. But at any rate, the leaders, including the director of the U.S. office of the mission, played very hands-on and even decisive "evangelist" roles. For example, and I think I've mentioned this before, at group meetings they held the reins at large group meetings. They would step back for different people to give their reports but it was like the leadership gave the person temporary space to talk, but the leader would take it back again afterwards and his comments in response would set the tenor for the whole group. Or sometimes the leadership would banter back and forth before the group or the leader might pull up another earlier event, but through all this the leadership was very much in charge and set the tenor and the example as to what was acceptable and what might be less so. But it was all done in a very congenial and apparently transparent and accessible way. You might say they were even leading by example through this kind of public interaction.
[4/9/11 comment: I remembered that there was an accountant on staff. I was trying to remember what was on the far right end of the hall of the second floor and that's when I remembered that his office was beyond my boss's (from the perspective of coming up the stairs and looking down the hall).]
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This comes at the end of the same sub-section as the text above:
"The symbolic approach to culture is particularly visible in organizations in which reliability rather than productivity is the bottom line because the costs of error can be catastrophic. Examples are nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, and complex weapons systems. A major aspects of these organizations is requisite variety, in which the complexities of the system and its operators must match the complexity required by the technology (Weick, 1987). High accountability and simultaneous centralization and flexibility are also part of the culture of these organizations (Roberts, Rousseau, and La Porte, in press)." (p. 130; bold in original)
I've already dealt some with high-reliability firms and I think there was an article or two also on high-technology firms, so I've discussed the differences between these types of organizations and the Vienna mission already, at least to some extent. It wasn't, for example, like we were running the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, for example, but the mission had a need for complete accuracy to avoid unnecessary any problems with the work in the Communist countries.
So this pressure and felt need for carefulness resulted in a similar kind of setting in which "reliability" was much more important than "productivity." Part of the distinction, I think, was also caused by the fact that "productivity" was mostly pretty predictable. That is, there was a process place that saw the textbooks from text-writing (or before that even) to publication and dissemination. The reliability part came into play regarding our location in Vienna, the then "spy capital of the world", working in countries that didn't really want us there, etc. Plus, there were a lot of things that couldn't really be predicted that could happen once you were actually doing something in the country, in one of the Communist countries. Anything could mess you up, such as some unknown disruption of transportation service that makes it hard to get to the next place you'd be teaching at, or maybe there was a last minute change as to where you'd be teaching, but you had no way of knowing that, and on and on. And all the time you had to not let on that you were a foreigner or doing Christian work. So in-country is where all the variables became big question marks and might have been difficult to foresee and impossible to control or do anything about. It wasn't like you were having troubles with the supplier of the paper for publishing the textbooks in the USA and you could just go out and try to find another one, even though that kind of thing also had the potential to be a disruption to the ministry.
Regarding complexity (mentioned in the text in the context of "complex weapons systems"), the mission had some complexity as far as relationships were concerned, both within and outside the mission, and part of this was intentional as a part of the security system (although maybe it wasn't complex to insiders, especially insiders closest to the apparently complex relationship(s)), but the biggest complexity was in the external environment, which is not necessarily the same as the environmental ambiguity described above, but maybe could be considered part of the ambiguity. But the complexity also included the juxtaposition of the mission between the various member missions involved in our work as well as relations with nationals and others. There were also relations that might be looked at as more static (oversight - board members; target nationals - students) and those that were more integrally part of the process from inception of a course idea to delivery of textbooks and instruction. And all of these different relationships involved different security requirements. We may not have necessarily have had such complexity of "technology" but I think the complexity of the mission's security efforts could be seen as their version of the "complex technology" factor.
All this is to say that reliability was more important than productivity, because of the ambiguities and complexities of external relations and environment, including an element of hostility towards our work (by the Communist governments) which also varied from country to country. So the symbolic approach to culture played a vital role in the mission's basic functioning and in its security measures.
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This is rather a short post (for me), but I'd rather not start in on the next section, as there's a lot there to comment on. So I'll pick up from here next time.
