But I mostly hung out with believers, so it's not like I became worldly or something. Not all my friends and acquaintances were Christians, but my impression was that the Russian Christians who knew me respected the way I was able to keep my Christian testimony in those relationships. And the city I lived in was called by the local a "big village" where word really got around and since I was about the first permanent (more or less) foreigner there I'm sure word really got around pretty quickly about my doings. So I just wanted to clarify what I meant by "assimilation." I wasn't perfect, but it's not like I left the faith or something; rather, it just had to do with the amount of contact I had with the West.
I'm not sure how effective my approach was. Eventually I felt sort of burned out, like the problems that I was as being related to dad's work were taking too much of a toll and I was too tired of swimming upstream. Some things I'll never know about what kind of impact I had, which is often true, when you think about it. We don't know what kind of impact we have on people and then we have a chance meeting or something and learn something surprising that we never knew or had long forgotten but was so important to the other person. But I do know that the women's ministry group I led, which consisted of women who were not Christians who were just interested in God and the Bible and wanted to know more and came to learn. These ladies ended out several of them going to different churches I had suggested to them, such as the Baptist church, I know for sure some went to.
I'll talk more about this when I get to my Russian experience, but this was something I know had impact on these women's lives. And I never had to use any deception to do it. And did I pay a price? You betcha! I had a political marriage, lost a child, probably was close to death myself... I paid a big price, and not to mention the price of how it affected my birth family. But I had a clear conscience and I wouldn't have changed that for anything.
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Yesterday the 2 long-awaited canvas photo enlargements came in and so I hung the pictures on the magnetic wall in the den (aka 2nd bedroom). I could have used maybe a dozen more earth magnets though, so there's a spot over my desk in the corner that's blank, but I know what I'd put in there, so when I have a little extra money to get the magnets I'll fill that space in. I also need to pick out the photos to have enlarged to 8x10s for the photo divider as I didn't have very many 8x10s for it. That will have to wait until I get through this financial crunch too, although I guess I could select the pictures in the meantime. I also had gotten two post card display racks from a store display store and that fits in too on one end of the wall (away from the desk by the door to the room). I've had a post card collection (just of post cards of places I've been to and ones people have sent me and a few odd others) since I was a young child, so I have a reasonable collection. It was a nice, if too brief, reprieve to work on this project. I really am discouraged with everything going on in my life.
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Sometimes it's my diversions that seem to get more attention, and the Scriptural discussion of deception seems to be one of those. That was an important discussion, so I don't mind that it seemed to draw extra attention. But let's get back to the text for now...
We're still in the main heading "ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE," but now we're in the sub-heading "Changing Organzational Culture."
To summarize part of the introduction, the authors are assuming in the sub-section of the chapter that the leadership knows what kind of change they want and the authors are providing recommendations based on that assumptions.
Also, they incorporate some rewards system methodology into their recommendations - the carrot vs. the stick. Without reading ahead, I'm thinking that the mission in Vienna can only do so much via "carrots" and that would be the usual warm fuzzy belongingness, but otherwise, there would be more sticks up their sleeves to work with (take away warm fuzzy belonginness, bring on unexplained but somehow patterned difficulties with one's work, social pressure, etc. - I know because I experienced these first hand). The carrots already existed though, so I think that they would have to take away the carrots and pressure that way or add new problems, rather than add by carrots like offering a raise or departmental party or something.
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"Add New Members... For this strategy to be effective, the new members must be either large enough in number or powerful enough in position to become the dominant culture. Otherwise, they will simply be absorbed into the old culture." (p. 451)
I can't see how this would ever have worked shy of starting over completely from scratch with a whole new organization, and that would have been imposssible because you had all the major players in that part of the world there, by way of missions involved in one way or another in that collective effort.
But the other thing is that this is also how my feeble hopes against hopes that the mission might somehow come to the table with me so we could "talk straight" and discuss our differences with the hopes of coming to some kind of an agreement... was all wrong. I was a peewee playing in the major leagues (that's baseball language for non-Americans or non-baseball officionados) and I was just 1 against a plethora. That is I was one against ca. 60 staff, 300 including family members, ca. 20 missions, who-knows-how-many the 20 missions represents, and even some people with connections to the U.S. military! Not only that, but they had smart, powerful people.
And what did I have? Well, I did have something, but not enough to be a force of change with them. In fact, I never really tried anything like insubordination to try to change the organization - I hate to think what kind of wrath I could have faced if I'd tried that! However, I wasn't politicized yet - that didn't happen until during my stay in Russia when I did that research at the University of Minnesota trying to figure out what was going on in my life - that's how I got all these articles. My friend their, Joan, was an influence too because she had come into the peace movement, but I had long before been questionning these things on my own too. Then in my doctoral program and my social movement research, then I became more politicized, but I wasn't yet when I wasn in Vienna, so I was just thinking of myself and the mission and I was thinking of how off the mark the mission was. But I wasn't thinking of making it my mission to change the mission, like an activist might. I wasn't there yet. I was still the conservative daughter of my parents.
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"Implement Culture Shock. A culture shock is an event that causes an organization to seriously examine its culture..." (p. 451)
The irony of this one is that the military chaplian-H.R. director (who didn't have any medical qualifications and never attempted any formal medical diagnosis processes) accused me of having "culture shock" after I was only there 5 months (about 2 years after I'd spent 7 years in Europe under a variety of capacities with no problems and ca. 5 months a couple years before that, when the real problem I was having was with the mission and had nothing to do with Austria).
I'm not in much of a position to speak on whether or how the mission might use culture shock as an opportunity for organizational culture change, but I suspect there was some of that with the fall of Communism in the East Bloc and the restructuring of the organization to focus on different countries, perhaps opening different offices and/or adding (or dropping) missions they worked with. Based on my experience with the mission I would expect this to all happen in a top-down fashion, especially change related to the fall of Communism in the East Bloc because thet was so close to where I was both geographically and chronologically, so I'm pretty certain that change at that point would have been top-down and perhaps guarded while there was uncertainty, especially with so many people and organizations involved. There's no doubt that these political events would have affected the mission's culture though, but there was rumor of interest in China even while I was there, so if they were going to go into other "closed countries" they'd have to keep security for that part of the work even if things opened up in other countries. Still, it would have to have affected the mission culture somehow, but the leadership would have to have been the one to translate what the political events would mean for the mission and how they would affect the mission's culture. The farther you move away from there in time and geography, however, the less certain I can be as to how they might have handled such things.
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"Change the Chief Executive. In addition to its potential shock value, changing the CEO can have a major impact on organizational culture." (p. 451)
HAH! hah-hah! heh-heh... yeah, right. That's a good one. It's not like it was Detroit or something where you can just send in a new CEO to Ford or Chrysler to bail out one of our failing gas guzzler auto industry giants or something. Maybe we could sent Mary Kay over to Vienna to use her pyramid skills in the mission... or how about Bill Gates! That would really be shock value, for sure, like all the missionaries would have heart attacks from the shock. No, I think the CEO wasn't something you could just change like that, although my old boss, who was the no. 2 man at the time is the head honcho now, but he was being groomed for the position, so there was no shock value there.
I don't think this would work because the missions on the board - the member missions all send a representative to the board - would have to agree that a new director was needed and then agree on the new director, but although it's possible that they're not all 100% unified on everything they're probably a pretty ingrown bunch for the most part and there would probably have to be something pretty bad going on for them to want to more or less impeach the current director. And if things were that bad, then they'd probably have to be doing some other remedial work at the mission to do clean up whatever mess the old director left behind. But while I think that things were a mess ethically as I've described, by their standards things were pretty much going just great.
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"Involve members. Since changing culture involves not only changing behavior patterns but also underlying assumptions, values, and beliefs, participative mechanisms are more likely to be successful at the attitudinal level. Culture change can be 'forced' if necessary and if the dominant culture is powerful enough, but enforcement is often a costly strategy. Individuals resent having their culture disrupted and will often resist attempts to make major changes. Participation and the associated communication processes that accompany it can often assist in reducing the resistance. In other words, overt acceptance is preferred over covert compliance." (p. 451)
Assuming the mission did go through a culture change, for example, after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe I think it would have included some of these preferred elements because it would have been working with trusted and proven members (unlike myself, who had already left anyway).
However, if you consider socialization as a sort of one-person culture change, then my experience might better be described in mostly the negative examples, as 'forced', etc. I think the other secretary who came a few months before me did have some resistance but she eventually succumbed, although I am not sure what her mental processes were as to how she experienced that. But I didn't succumb because there were enough very specific elements that I had knowledge about that I disagreed on, so I wasn't so easy to sway because those convictions were pretty strong and I never (to this day) found anything to change my thinking on them.
I think, however, that I was pretty open to different cultures, especially when you consider that my undergraduate studies was European Studies and that I had spent some time abroad. So it's not exactly accurate to say that I resented having my culture "disrupted", although being forced and smothered in it, was something I'd never experienced before, even living abroad, like renting a room from a German lady while studying German in East Germany, where I was with locals all day except for some other students in class.
But not only was there the issue of the organizational culture being forced on me, but also the strength of it ("if the dominant culture is powerful enough"). The dominant culture of the mission was powerful because 1) the leadership would tolerate no competing culture (or deviant individual for that matter), 2) because the culture was practically all-pervasive; and 3) because 3) the culture had teeth - there were real and present punishments that could be meted out to the socially deviant. Probably the typical punishment would be some kind of social rebuke, but this could range from mild to unified castigation or worse.
Needless to say in my case there wasn't any relevant organizational change communication process to participate in, which didn't help the resistance issue. But I'm not sure that anyone else going through socialization would have had this either. Sometimes in this blog, in case you're new to it, there are times when I've had to try to decide it there was something different about me if everything else seemed the same but the outcomes were different for me. So in this case maybe it was my familiarity and experience with things Eastern European and missions in that part of the world. So other new missionaries without that background might have deferred to the mission leaders, to their bosses or mentors and acquiesced more easily, wherease I had that background and had different ideas and beliefs about them. So even though none of us where given a chance to be involved in, say (real) two way dialog about our socialization, which should have increased our resistance to change, to socialization, the others ended out acquiescing to the socialization, whereas I didn't, or at least I didn't completely.
So then, the last sentence in this paragraph seems to rephrase this making overt equal direct (bidirectional) communication and covert equal no communication. In the case of socialization I changing it a bit from the case of organizational change. In socialization the organizational is changing the individual to assimilate into the organization (although this is an oversimimplification of the process). In this process I think overt would have real meaningful bidirectional communication whereas covert would have more unidirectional communication with maybe some bidirectional communication, but limited or forced bidirectional communication. On the other hand, in organizational change, individuals will be more likely to have overt acceptance if they are actively a part of the change process by being a part of it and communicating it to others. On the other hand, if they are not an active part of the change process they will be more likely to have only a covert compliance to the change.
In fact, as we will eventually see, at the end of my time in Vienna, the secretary who was to be my mentor told me a couple times a story, sort of a parable that made me think that they thought of me as not submitting inside. So I would be like the person who had the covert compliance. If you look at the typd of socialization I've described for covert compliance - unidirectional communication with maybe some bidirectional communication, but limited orforced bidirection communication, then it fits. That is. Did the mission ever want to sit down at the table to talk turkey with me? Are you kidding?! I'm not sure they ever talked turkey with anyone in these terms, with basic issues of operation under question. Of course, they never really knew what my beefs were, either, though. Maybe it's just as well they never asked to sit down at the table with me. They never thought to take me seriously. I guess it never crossed any of their minds to think that maybe a blonde might actually have a smart thought or something, although they did have a blond on the woman's team. So maybe it was a bias against secretaries. Or maybe it was a bias against daughter's of men who worked in star wars...
In any case, according to this author, it follows naturally that I should have resisted change based on the fact that I was not given adequate participation in the communication process. (And if you count the meetings with my boss... I don't think those count... because we never discussed anything that I thought came close to any of my concerns.)
The other question is, of course, how come I resisted and no one else seemed to resist, or at least didn't resist very long? Well, I've discussed this elsewhere, and my answer above as about all I want to add to that discussion here.
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"Managers should not expect major changes in cultures over short periods over short periods. Cultures are complex phonomena that are the result of complex social processes occurring over time." (p. 451)
Since the informal organization in the Vienna mission was created and managed by the administration it probably would have been easier for them to change the mission's culture than many other organizational cultures. Another factor is that high level of education where a good 2/3 of the staff have higher education (mostly Th.M.) degrees and several others had bachelor and other degrees, so this might have made it easier to change the culture too. In addition, the organization was so close knit and security conscious that that tight social bond could have provided extra leverage for cultural change if need be. Factors getting in the way of speedy change would be the number of missions involved and the geograhical dispersion of the workers. The authors assume that the informal organization is an organic process, but in the Vienna mission it was more like a social engineering process.
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This is the end of the chapter (besides a few closing remarks that I'm skipping), so next time we'll start a different article or chapter from my organizational behavior file. I feel like this one has been helpful in bringing out some good ideas.
