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One thing I got to thinking about over the weekend is the difference between my dad and I. Both of us were stymied from doing what we really wanted to do, but how that happened and the effect on either of us was completely different.Dad wanted to be a pilot - an airplane pilot. He told me about this when I was a late teenager I think. He said he wasn't allowed because he wore glasses and at that time he was disqualified from being a pilot because of that.
Well presumably that was something that he would have known upfront and that wouldn't have been difficult to find out about, so you'd know early on that you couldn't go in that profession. So there was that point. But then there was also the issue that he wasn't going to let that, as far as I could tell, ruin his life. When he was drafted into the Korean War (although he never saw battle because the war ended before he got out of boot camp), he chose the Air Force because of his interest in flying, and then he worked for Boeing after finishing his draft enlistment.
But I never was told that I couldn't become a missionary to Eastern Europe... although after I left the Vienna mission a missionary with Campus Crusade for Christ told me that sometimes the don't let people with parents in the military work in missions in that part of the world. (Note: although my dad wasn't in the military he was in aerospace, the "military industrial complex" end of Boeing). So I put years and years and lots of money (and my parents' money and even my Grandmother's money) into preparing for that profession and if, say, the U.S. government didn't want me in that field I was never told about it. It wasn't at all like knowing in advance that wearing glasses automatically disqualified one from being an airplane pilot. I was way way way emotionally invested in this and I really felt that God had called me to that field and I still think that.
So then the other thing is after leaving Vienna I was broken but after some regrouping I was so convinced of God's call that I took another stab at it again. By myself, Sans mission.
So the thing was that I faced all these nebulous entities, often hard to explain problems that always seemed to make my way difficult - sometimes exceedingly difficult. It seemed that nothing about my career denial would be clearcut like dad's denial because he wore glasses. Of course, you could always blame it on me, saying I was incompetent, crazy, or the like. But that would only work for my Vienna years (1987-1989), not my Russia years (1991-1997), for some strange - or crazy - reason. And I did have some problems in Russia, just different ones.
The work itself was also much different, of course, which bears noting. Dad couldn't just decide he was going to try to work around the system and try to become a pilot despite his wearing glasses, as the airline industry is, was and always has been highly regulated regarding licensure of pilots. He'd probably have to go to a third world country to become a pilot where wearing glasses wasn't an issue, which, if he wanted to become a pilot badly enough, I suppose was possible.
However, in my case, the field "Eastern European missionary" was not exactly what you'd call highly regulated - it's not as if you have to get a license to become one, for example. Criteria for entering this profession are rather idiosyncratically set by the particulars of individual missions, positions, locations, etc. So there should have been a lot more opportunity for me to work around any barrier, if I'd known of one. So, for example, if it was true that children of military members might not be allowed into work in Eastern Europe, does that mean that all missions across the board wouldn't allow them? does it mean that these potential workers wouldn't be allowed into any position in any country under any circumstance? etc. And this assumes that all missions cooperate with the U.S. government in disallowing these types of workers. Otherwise, how do they find out that these potential workers are children of military? I don't remember being asked about it, so were the mission leadership informed about my dad? (Considering they had 2 military chaplains on staff this isn't a completely unreasonable supposition, I think.) Also, it is not completely unheard of for missionaries to work on their own or to set up their own mission. Even one of our administrators had done that very thing instead of going through a regular sending mission. So who's to say that I had to go through a mission anyway and be subject to their determination that I was disqualified from ministry to that part of the world because of my dad?
So you see, my area of work did allow a lot more opportunity to try to get around the system than did dad's line of work. He would have to have left the country to work as a pilot. As for my line of work, however, there was no way, really, for me to know up front who I could maybe work for and who I couldn't, but then I didn't know that there was a roadblock out there in the first place. So dad's roadblock was black and white, but very unforgiving, and mine was hidden and only discovered by trial and error.
Another issue, of course, is the gender one. For me, I began to see more and more that giving up on my dream meant becoming Susie homemaker, and some Christian men thought missionary experienc and the like was very noble and attractive, like it made one more of a trophy wife in Evangelical circles. That really is demeaning to me. Is that all it means? That's it? That's not what it means to me and that's never what it meant to me. And I fiind it very disgusting to have it trivialized like that.
Anyway, that's it for the comparison between dad's and my work roadblocks.
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This next main subject heading is "ORGANIZATION-ENVIRONMENT RELATIONS," and this is from the introduction:"This section looks at some of the ways in which managers and organizations deal with their environments in terms of: 1) managerial efforts to reduce uncertainty by controlling the environment; and 2) attempts to structure organizations so they "fit" environmental pressures and demands." (p. 165)
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The first sub-heading is: "Controlling the Environment."
"Thompson has noted five basic ways in which organizations attempt to exert control over their environment to reduce the level of uncertainty in their planning. First, under 'norms of rationality,' organizations try to buffer or isolate their core technologies (inner operations) from external influences. Through both input (e.g. stockpiling of inventories) and output (e.g., marketing) mechanisms, managers attempt to ensure that the core task of the organization is not directly affected by external conditions such as scarcity of materials (input) or changes in consumer preferences (output)." (p. 165)
The other 4 ways are basically an escallation if the first one doesn't work, but I don't think those other methods are very helpful for my purposes here.
The "core technologies" in the Vienna mission case would be the various secrets, including names of students, when classes are being held, what the classes are, who the missions are, where the money comes from, how textbooks get to the students, etc., etc.; basically all the things that the security system protects. So this "buffer or isolate their core technologies" is more or less part of the security system, and marketing might include some of the misinformation ("We're an international publisher."). But the marketing, especially back home, also serves the purpose of making sure that there are good vibes there to keep the financial support and supply of workers coming so that the work can continue. Also, they want a certain image of the mission back home and they want to be the ones defining the image, so that everyone has a general appreciation for why it might be necessary to maintain a certain level of secrecy, etc.
They did need to make sure they had textbooks on time or ahead of schedule for the courses to be taught because it was very difficult to reschedule courses since so much advance planning went into the scheduling and it was such a complex process to get everyone on board at the right time in the right place, and even then something could go wrong. So having the logistics taken care of on the mission's side was very important, leaving only changes to happen on the Eastern European side of things, so they did try to plan ahead for the environmental uncertainties. They couldn't control much on the Eastern European side of things, so they focused more on controlling what they could of the part of the work that took place in the West to minimize disruptions.
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The next sub-section is "Struction-Environment Fit."
"As the earlier discussion of mechanistic and organic forms of organization, and the concepts of differentiation and integration pointed out, there is no one ideal form of organization structure... As Burns and Stalker argured, the most effective structure is one that adjusts to these environment requirements - a mechanistic form of organization in stable, certain environments, and an organic design in more unpredictable, turbulent fields." (p. 168)
I'd just say here that the formal structure of the mission was pretty stable, but I don't think my changing position is exactly organic - I didn't choose to change, for example. One area where the mission might be considered contingent is the constantly changing instructional teams. They had to keep changing to defy the attention of the authorities at the borders, for one thing, but there were other reasons as well for this, such as bringing in outside experts, introducing other potential recruit missionaries to the mission, etc.
None of the structure descriptions are particularly helpful in describing the mission. The closest one, I think is "professional bureaucracy," but even that is not that helpful. Basically it would just say that the theologians on staff couldn't be easily regulated, decisions were decentralized and there was less formalization than in some other structures. This was largely true as far as the strictly theological aspects of the work was concerned, except that they had to get everyone on board with every single theological jot and tittle - all the missions, all the denominations represented by the students in each of the countries the mission taught in, etc. So all of a sudden things don't seem quite so decentralized after all, because of the environmental complexity that was integral to the work the theologians did.
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That's the end of this chapter.I saw one of the neurologists today. (I have 2). This neurologist isn't that helpful, but I am afraid to leave him because the other one, while I like him better, when my legs are very bad (from spinal stenosis), then it's hard to get out there to him. It's frustrating. He wants to wait to get my heart taken care of before anything else, though, which is probably a wise thing. He knows my cardiologist and says he's good.
