"A common misconception is that an organization has a uniform culture. However, at least as anthropology uses the concept, it is probably more accurate to treat organizations 'as if' they had a uniform culture... According to this view an organizational culture is a common perception held by the organization's members. Everyone in the organization would have to share this perception. However, realistically, all may not do so to the same degree. As a result, there can be a dominant culture as well as subcultures throughout a typical organization." (p. 51).
I'm going to ignore the final reference to subcultures, because the next paragraph speaks more to that topic. Regarding the possibility of there having been "a common perception held by" the Vienna mission members, I'd like to think about that a bit here. First of all, the "Vienna mission" actually included members who lived in Eastern Europe and also a sizable U.S. printing office. But for now I'll just address the Vienna office staff. Secondly, the intensely (underscore) security-minded management would have been very concerned about things like organizational cultural "perceptions" and, as I've said numerous times, had an extremely low toleration for deviance.
This doesn't tell us what the "perceptions" might have been at the mission, but I think it's safe to say that one might expect a fair amount of uniformity (largely intentionally managed from top down). It seemed to me that the mission wanted new members to be all engrossed in the mission at least until they became properly inducted, after which time, depending on their position, they might be allowed more independent contact outside the mission. But the initial seclusion was needed to inculcate the mission's values or "perceptions". This kind of separation from the world is more like what might happen in the military or cults or the like, as I've discussed elsewhere.
But the point is that this kind of socialization is pretty drastic, I think, and might have allowed for a stronger uniform organizational culture, because the mission was in a position to demand more by way of organizational culture than some other organizations, even some other missions, might have been able to (and get away with).
And, of course, they could always hide behind the security concern, which wasn't too terribly difficult, since all the right-wing, Moral Majority Evangelical Christians back home were adamantly anti-Communist and so much so that they mostly wouldn't mind the mission applying a little good ol' American pragmatism (of the ends-justifies-the-means variety) in their security efforts. In this way, the mission could do pretty much what it wanted (which I've also discussed elsewhere under the subject "accountability") and it was free to develop whatever organizational culture (uniform or otherwise) it wanted. The biggest controls would have been the member missions, and they would have been the ones to have the most impact on the organizational culture, but I think that some missions had more clout than others in different spheres, and regarding the work in Communist Countries savviness, the theological powerhouses probably had to concede to the missions that specialized in that part of the world on security-related issues, which are the aspects of the organizational culture that might most likely have been trouble spots for the more theologically inclined, for example. Unless, of course, they were right-wing card-carrying Moral Majority members, in which case they might have had no qualms with the more pragmatic Communist country specializing missions.
[I'm just describing here the possible interplay between missions because it was sometimes a tightrope act to satisfy all parties and not everyone agreed with everything. And the issues I discuss above are real issues, whether or not they would have been verbalized or not at the time. They are my perception of some of what was going on in the larger scope of things.]
So what were the characteristics of the uniform culture of the mission? I think I've pretty well answered this, too. I would include the core values of the group as including: a heightened sense of security for the organization and the people it works with; a strong commitment to the organization and the individuals in it; a lack of tolerance for anyone or anything that might be deemed a security risk; a 'healthy' respect for authority within the organization; a shared theology; a shared view of Communism, etc.
I'm not sure if the leadership would be willing to concede these values, but it's possible that some former "rank and file" members might be willing to. The thing is that even if these values might not seem blatantly ghastly to some (or to all, even), I think that management would know that to concede these shared uniform values would be to open up a discussion and some of their stakeholders might have questions about some of these qualities. However, that being said, this many years later it's quite possible that no one will really care anyway, so it would have been more risky to management to agree closer to the time I was there (and before the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe). But even so, if they still have some of these same values to this day (maybe using something else in place of Communism), then they still might want to deny them. Of course, if I'm just a little pipsqueak that no one listens to anyway, then they wouldn't really care one way or the other.
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"Important, but often overlooked, are the subcultures in an organization. A subculture is a set of values shared by a minority, usually a small minority, of the organization's members. Subcultures typically are a result of problams and experiences that are shared by members of a department or unit...
Subcultures can weaken and undermine an organization if they are in conflict with the dominant culture and/or the overall objectives. Successful firms, however, find that this is not always the case. Most subcultures are formed to help the members of a particular group deal with the specific, day-to-day problems with which they are confronted. The members may also support many, if not all, of the core values of the dominant culture." (p. 51-52)
In the case of the Vienna mission, I'd have to say that they were of the "successful firms" ilk, in that departmental differences in culture were very specifically related to the differences of the work they did. However, I think that everyone had to share all of the dominant culture core values and I'd stick to that until I found something to the contrary because it was so important to mission security for everyone to trust everyone else and that they couldn't afford to have anyone (like me, for example) outside of the control of the central management. So even the departmental culture differences were managed so that they didn't fly off somewhere (value-wise) outside the purview of the whole group. There was also enough interaction and crossing of work boundaries that I think the differences between groups was softened, rather than being cut and dry differences between one group and the other. People and departments affected one another, in other words.
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That's all for this sub-section and I need to get on with my day, so I'll leave off here. There are two more sub-sections though.
