But back to the text...
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We're still in "Part I: The Nature of Political Citizenship," but now we're looking at the citizenship rights aspect of it.
Citizenship Rights
"Citizens have rights that are not available to noncitizens. The substance of these rights varies with time and place, and may also vary across groups of citizens. That is, some citizens may have more rights than other citizens at any point in time, and these differences may affect the nature of the ties that bind citizens to one another." (p. 253)
At this point the author does not attempt to make a carry over to the business/employment world, but I will do so vis a vis my understanding of the Vienna mission (in the late 1980s). "Noncitizens" would have been those not working with the mission. Even family members were non really citizens and volunteers and temporary workers would be like "green card holders" in the USA. These people had limited access and rights on their own to the mission.
Some noncitizens were accepted as friendly but everyone else was deemed potentially unfriently/an enemy (Communist or cooperating with Communists). Friendly noncitizens were mostly local Christians or neighbors or local businesses they'd relations with for years. But I'm getting off the subject here.
Certainly citizens within the mission could have more or less rights than each other, such as my boss having more rights than me or my mentor (my boss' boss' secretary) having more rights than me. But sometimes it wasn't just a matter of having more or less rights but of having different rights For example, the layout editor would have different rights than would the secretary of the "seminar" director [that's how I have his title on papers I wrote as I left Vienna that my brother just sent me from Seattle - 'Seminar' is German for seminary]. These differences can be explained because everyone was on a "need to know" basis and had access to different information and the like.
So in the Vienna mission you had differentiation externally, internally (both vertically and horizontally). However, since I have also discussed informal organization here on this blog, it might be worth noting that I expect that it also made a difference.
As to whether or not these differences of rights affects the ties that bound the missionaries to each other, I can't particularly say that they did. I think, rather, that one's position in the informal organization was more likely to play a role. That is, if one was doing very well, no matter what one's actual job, and if one had managed to internalize the mission's values and norms and pass with flying colors and continue to pass each test flung one's way so that one progressed along the informal organization (since there wasn't much room for growth in the formal organization), then I think maybe one could have felt the ties strengthened with the other members as one received social reaffirmation for doing well and passing these tests. I think spouses went through something like this too, but adapted to them.
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"T.H. Marshall (1965), in reviewing three centuries of English history to explain the extension of citizens' rights to an ever broader share of the population, identified three categories of rights: civil (legal protection of life, liberty, and property), political (participation in decision-making), and social (adequate level of socioeconomic benefits)." (p. 253)Since I've already started applying these quoted to the Vienna mission, I might as well not stop now, right? Hah! Hah-hah-hah!
What the English built over the course of three centuries, the Vienna mission managed to tear down in zero seconds. Actually, they didn't have to tear it down, because they didn't have it to begin with. That's despite the fact that my sending mission was out of England.
Just in case you think I'm being a little harsh, let's go through them one by one.
1. Civil rights. Liberty was the main issue here, as I was brought there to be a secretary and I was beforehand it would be okay if I had an Austrian ministry. Nevertheless, I felt a lot of pressure to conform including not spending so much time with Austrian activities (and being so independent - which is virtually a synonym of liberty). Also, I was pressured to have a roommate, which I didn't want.
2. Political. This is meant in a democratic way and this is completely obsurd in the Vienna mission context. As far as I was/am concerned it was an oligarchy. Maybe not unlike the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Maybe it was just me and because I was always such an outsider, but that's how I saw it. You'd have to prove it to me that it was otherwise. The department heads might have served as some advisory roles as appropriated, but it was the board (which included the representatives from member mission, the mission director, assistant director and North American director) that really made the decisions.
3. Social. In the Vienna mission these were NOT rights, but privileges, and they could be given or taken away according to one's standing with the mission. In other words, this was used as a behavioristic reward or punishment. I experienced this in the extreme at the tail end of my time in Vienna, but I think others got it to a lesser extent, just engh to make them sweat a little maybe. Certainly, though, I was overwhelmed with the attention when I first arrived and I thought it was an inordinate amount of attention so it threw me back and I didn't know what to make of it.
So you can see that these citizenship rights theories might as well be wadded up and thrown in the trash as far as relates to the Vienna mission.
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Here Grahham does apply Marshall's rights to organizations..."Organizational civil rights would include fair treatment in routine personnel matters (hiring, assignment, evaluation, etc.), and also guarantees of due process when problems arise (e.g., grievance investigation and disciplinary proceedings). Political rights would include the ability to participate in decision making both about current operational matters, and about broader organizational policies, objectives, and spending plans. Social rights would include economic benefits (regular salary/wages, bonuses, insurance, pensions, etc.), social status symbols, and training/educational opportunities.
... Given the hierarchical structure typical of most organizations, however, unequal rights within organizations are not only possible but likely." (p. 253-254)
Nothing could be fair with the mission because even the few written rules I knew of the mission didn't keep with any predictability, and I've discussed that several times already. So how could there be any fairness? The mission leadership had their own criteria for judging and it wasn't based on known rules. Presumably once you became an insider and internalized the values and norms you began to undersand the logic, but I can't be sure of that and it was a risk one took to begin down that road. Was the mission fair? As far as I knew it wasn't. If it was fair it was based on some unwritten insider logic.
I was tossed around from assignment to assignment, and it wasn't based on my doing a sub-quality performance on my job, nor having a poor attitude on the job because I always had a good attitude and did what I was told without complaining and even suggested new ways to go about things if I thought it might be an improvement and these were always appreciated. So the issue was never my work per se, so it never seemed fair to me.
There wasn't any due process. I could go to my sending mission, but that was no help because the local office of my sending mission was directed by the person who was on the board of directors for the mission I was working at, so I wasn't really going to get anywhere there.
I already described how we really didn't have any real opportunity to participate in decision making.
The social rights Graham lists here aren't very applicable to a faith mission context. However, the mission could have provided training/education opportunities, especially since we were a seminary, so having an "in-service" day or something along those lines might have been reasonable. But for me they denied me the right to study German which was a right written in the employee handbook (1 month for each pledged year of service). I got by without it, but their excuse was a bunch of b.s.: that there was too much work for me to do, when in fact I spent the next two months studying the software manual, when I had offered to take a software class before I left the States if they would have told me which software they used (this was the 1980s, remember).
This is the end of this citizenship rights section, but I hope you see how shipwrecked the mission was in this regard.
