I need to apologize to my readers, because I'm not doing such a great job of editing as I should. I'm sorry and I hope to eventually go back and clean it all up. It's just that my life has been such that I never know when something is going to come into my life to cut short whatever it is I was doing or otherwise result in some kind of crisis. The most recent example of that was the health crisis that resulted in a several month gap in my postings. But before that it was a family situation. And before that it was something else again.
So because of that history I'm just sort of pumping them out. But when I get back to the chronology part I'll probably have to slow down a bit because I'll have to make sure I have all my records together so I can piece it together as best I can. I expect I'll end out making a lot of significant changes to those posts after I've submitted them as I find some new record or memorabilia that brings to mind something else I needed to say, for example. The Austrian years are going to be the hardest to write because of documentation issues.
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This next section in the text, as I mentioned last time is a list of "Questions to Identify Organizational Culture." I'll probably have to break the list up into more than one post, as I've had to do with other such lists recently.
"1. What is the background of the founders and others who have followed them? Knowing something about the founders and the ideas they laid down in their organization helps clarify our understanding about those organizations." (p. 132)
I hope this isn't too much of a shock to you (!), but some of these types of information weren't available, especially in much detail. This was all part of the Eastern European secrecy type of thing. It was no secret, however, that there were 5 missions involved in the original founding of the composite mission I worked at. I just went to their web site and it says they were founded in 1979, which is about what I was thinking too - that it had been around about 10 years when I arrived. Other than knowing who the organizations are I don't know much more. I don't remember knowing about an organizational constitution either. If there was one, probably the director's secretary had it. I suppose that the longer you were with the mission and, depending on your position in it, you'd probably learn more about the organization's history. (I also just learned on their website that my old boss - some of the time - is the director of the whole organization now.)
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"2. How does the organization respond to crises and other events and what has been learned from these experiences? Focusing on stressful events helps us understand how particular assumptions came to be formed and something about the ordering of cultural assumptions. (p. 132)
Ironically enough, I'm not sure the mission had ever had a crisis per se, which was at least partly due to their all-pervasive security measures, although security wouldn't have protected against every kind of possible crisis (e.g., funding shortfall, natural disaster, etc.). The mission constantly thought about security in particular, but I've already said a lot about that.
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"3. Who are considered deviant in the culture and how does the organization respond to them? Deviants define the boundaries of cultures and understanding them helps us decipher cultures." (p. 132)
Well, since I was the main deviant for the duration of my time with the mission, on the one hand one deviant isn't much to go on, but on the other hand at least I know the subject well! Based on my single subject analysis, I would say that lack of total submission a/k/a insubordination was one form of deviation at the mission. If there were others, I could only speculate about them, but the obvious things like gross immorality or the like, come to mind.
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"4. What are the people in the organization like to work with? Such a question seeks a general understanding of the organization's members." (p. 132)
The people were very friendly and looked out for each other almost to a fault. However, if you were deviant, it was possible to see another side of them, as I did. In either case their uniformity was evident, as they all pretty much acted in concert with each other. At least there was little possibility of mixed signals: you were either in and everyone agreed you were in, or you were out and everyone agreed on that too.
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"5. What is done to help a person along once he starts working in the organization? This question addresses the mechanisms of socialization, training, etc." (p. 132)
I've already dealt with this one a lot too. Socialization was individual, seemed to generally involve debasement which should be followed by some kind of feeling of inefficacy followed by a mentor or someone from a reference group (or both) helping you on your way to learning the ropes and learning about the organization and its ways.
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"6. What does it take to do well in the organization? This question reveals performance necessary to get along well in the organization." (p. 132)
I'm actually not completely sure about this. There was care that the quality of work should be high, but I never heard of this being an issue with anyone (i.e., someone work not being up to par), but we didn't have anything like annual reviews like in a regular job either. To succeed you had to be reasonably good at your job, but fitting in with the group would have been about as important as the quality of the work itself. Fitting in with the group would have included going through the process of initial submission to their norms.
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"7. What are the mechanisms for finding out how one is performing in the organization? This question reveals something about performance and other feedback mechanisms." (p. 132)
If you got feedback about your work it would most likely come from your boss, I expect, but I think it could also come from co-workers who worked closely with you in your position. But you would also get social feedback from others regarding how you were doing in the organization as a whole. This feedback might not necessarily be directly stated as feedback, but might still serve that purpose. This kind of feedback might respond positively to your efforts to build bridges between groups in the mission or negatively to gossiping, which might lower trust among members.
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"8. How does one find out what is really going on in this organization? Answers to this question will reveal communication strategies and the existence of trust." (p. 132)
Now this is a very interesting question. Since I never did really figure out what was happening in the Vienna mission, I can't answer it with any certainty. But I will say that I'm pretty sure my not completely submitting to the mission was a barrier to really understanding it (the mission), so I think that submitting totally to the mission is probably the first big step that would position oneself to learn more about the mission. The mission wouldn't totally trust you until you totally trusted it (and probably also proved yourself some too). As long as the mission didn't totally trust you (which it wouldn't until you had totally submitted) then the mission would withhold information that would make things more understandable. There are many ways it could hinder such comprehension, all of which were security tactics, and include: withholding explanations or not making them as detailed as they could, limiting your access to information, or even things like disinformation and misinformation, which I think they used at the end of my time with the mission to confuse me so I wouldn't really know what was going on any more when I left there.
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I'm going to end here. These actually aren't quite as helpful as I thought, although some of them are worded a bit differently to give a new twist to old information. At this rate I should finish the list of questions in my next post... barring any unforeseen interruption in my life!
