The cardiologist today agreed with the anesthesiologist regarding the migraine medicine, so that was good. He said that my stress test was normal (but the EKG I'd had done in his office was abnormal), so he proposed having a halter. They're supposed to call to set it up.
The migraine medicine change made a difference in my stationery bike heart rate in physical therapy as it didn't immediately spike like it had been doing recently. Also, it looks like yesterday's lumbar epidural was also having some effect, although it's still early, as it can take a few days for the full effect of an epidural shot.
When I returned home from the cardiologist's I found a box from my brother - it looks like he was going through some more stuff in storage (from after mom's death) and he sent me and my other brother things he thought we should have. Among the things in my box were some notes and letters from my time in Vienna!! This should be a great boon to my narration of my time spent with the mission, since I got rid of a lot of my mission-related things when I moved to Russia. I had given up on mom having any of these left any more, thinking she'd maybe "down-sized" at some point. I haven't read any of it, though, just sort of flipped through it.
***
This will finish the discussion on the Miner text. This section is titled "Putting Ideas to Work for Performance and Productivity."
"Although theory and research dealing with effective organizational structure and design have not produced as many hard facts as might be desired, some important insights have emerged. First, research has increased our understanding of the factors that should be considered in organizational design...
Second, the domain into which the structure being used falls must be acknowledged. A given domain may characterize either a whole organization or a single component of it, but once an organizatinal unit is defined as belonging in a particular domain, than its structures and processes should match the requirements of that domain very closely." (p. 539)
Miner lists several examples of factors affecting organizational design for the first area of insight and for the second one he goes on to discuss how the various types of systems might fit different contexts. In other words, there are clear ways of knowing whether a particular organizational structure is appropriate for a given context or not.
***
"Finally, in group or sociotechnical systems - the missionary form - ideology predominates, and structure may in fact be at a minimum (replaced by culture...). Group norms in an expanded form run the system, and anything that interferes with this process can only create role conflict and ambiguity." (p. 539)The informal culture in the Vienna mission could be described in these terms to a large extent. This may explain, at least in part, why I experienced role conflict (stress, with my extracurricular activities) and had trouble understanding that the mission wanted at times. I was experiencing the ambiguity in as much as I was interfering with the mission's apparent desires and plans for me (e.g., making the secretaries my reference group).
However, this can't describe the mission's functioning as a whole, I think; it can only describe the informal organization functioning, although the informal organization was a significant part of the organization. And I'm not sure it can fully describe the informal organization either, because there were hierarchical aspects of the informal organization also.
***
That's it for tonight and tomorrow I'll start a new text.
