"Proposition 1: The more the organization tends to apply symbolic and normative control on individual behavior (i.e., normative organization), the greater becomes the importance of commitment in determining behavior. The more organization tends to apply material control (i.e., a utilitarian organization), the greater the importance of instrumental motiation (Etzioni, 1961)." (p. 425)
The Vienna mission was the former - a normative organization. Although the leaders were sort of a buck stops here authorities, because there was so much at stake security wise we all were potential narks on each other. Of course, as long as you were "playing by the rules" there shouldn't be any problems. If there was an accidental slip or there was something you hadn't been informed of, that would generally be no big deal and you'd be informed (hopefully it wouldn't be be in Eastern Europe or something major).
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"Proposition 2: The greater external-environmental threats are to the organization and its members, the greater becomes the importance of commitment. The lesser such threats are, the greater is the influence of instrumental motivation. In stress situations, dependency of individuals on others increases, as in Schachter's (1959) study. Therefore, normative pressures become more salient." (p. 425-426)
The Vienna mission was working in atheistic countries, many of which were (more or less) committed to wiping out all religion. As such, the mission worked under conditions of threats. When you add to that the posbility of some government connections, like at the very least U.S. military chaplians on staff, then the ante increases even more because then you have two (the USA and whatever East Bloc government) antagonistic governments facing off. To me that smacks of fairly high external-environmental threats. Predictably, the mission did have a normative value structure.
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"The conceptualization of commitment in this paper is founded on the premise that work behavior may be determined not only by calculative-instrumental processes, but also by normative pressures such as personal moral standards. Such internalized pressures, once established, exert stable, long term influences on behavior that are independent of situational circumsances and linkages to rewards on punishments." (p. 426)
This is exactly what the Vienna mission did and wanted in its workers. It had to be able to rely on everyone to have the norms and values internalized just as here described. This is what I've been trying to say, described in a different way here. It's exactly what the mission did. I can't say whether or not the mission and the leadership had thought through all this logic of it or not, but I'm sure they knew they had to be able to trust everyone and everyone had to know the rules reliably.
And here's another things that I'm not sure whether the mission had thought about or not, but would make sense. Some of the things weren't public knowledge, weren't things they'd let you put in your prayer letter, for example, right? I just want to make sure we're on the same page with that there.
I'm going to go back to my ESL teaching days. In language - any language, even whatever your native language is - you don't think about all the rules of the language when you think, do you? No! You just think and you sot of forget the rules, they're just sort of in the background somewhere helping you formulate your language or understand writing or listening, right?
Well, maybe that kind of thing could even have been useful for the Vienna mission too. After all, it didn't have much of a socialization system anyway. So a lot of your learning is learning by watching what others do and by example. So you don't really ever learn some of the rules, you just sort of absorb them by osmosis. Maybe for the ones that could be controversial this would be a nice way to get around it, what do you think? So long as the person doesn't notice it, maybe it'll just glide by. So that's one controversial rule down, 100 to go. And you wouldn't even think of putting it in your prayer letter because it's non-news.
Although my B.A. was in European Studies, I'm afraid I had to spend more time observing North Americans to figure them out than I did Austrians while working with the mission in Vienna.
That concludes this article.
