326. Organizational Behavior, Pt. 50 (Smircich, pt. 3)

I'm sorry I was away a few days, but I had a few things I needed to do... nothing extraordinary though.

I'm just 52 but because of my health I have limitations more like someone in their 70s or even older.  It's difficult to realize you can't do things you used to do.  Sunday I led the prayer and praise time at church and because of my compromised cognitive faculties it was difficult for me.  I used to teach and so thinking on my feet was an every day thing, but I just couldn't get beyond thinking in pretty concrete terms and I think I rambled too.  So I think I better stick with things I can plan ahead for and not have surprises and have to deal with ad hoc things.

This is a combination of the fibromyalgia and the migraine, I think, that are having this affect, and this has been tested as a fibromyalgia symptom of mine.

***

The other news is some correspondence I've had with a cousin.  My family - my two brothers and I -  are just falling apart.  I think my brothers will sort of stick together and I'll end out alone.  However, my brothers won't like me being alone because they need me as bait to help them look attractive to other women.  They want other women to see how they are with women, and I'd be the exemplar.  Only I don't want to be that exemplar because I don't like their attitude towards and treatment of women (only I can't tell them that because then we'd get in a huge argument where they'd end out looking lily white through some magic slight of hand or the other, and I'd end out looking some sort of bad (i.e., bad, crazy, deceitful, etc.).

It really hurts to see my brothers the way I understand they are, but I can't do anything but pray for them.

The one brother who was the caretaker of mom, being geographically close to her (my other brother and I were thousands of miles away), is so angry but hides it except to those he feels closest too - so most people don't know about it.  And he's manipulative as all get out.  He knows where he has an advantage in the family and he works it for all it's worth to get what he wants.  And he withholds things too to make sure it's clear who is the boss and who has the power.  He's wicked.  I told him, for example, that I want the steak knives that go with mom's sharp knives since I let him have the good china and the silver both.  He knows I want those and we're not talking real expensive items either, but something that might have meaning.  But he's withholding them, why?  At the time he said that I "Already got too much."  It's just a game as far as I'm concerned.  And I'm putting together a family heritage cookbook and he won't even help me with it by 1) identifying some names on recent recipe cards 2) letting me add recipes from the slowcooker cookbooks that he wanted and 3) letting me see if there are any quotes I could use from mom's Bible that he has.  This heirloom cookbook is for everyone and it's ridiculous to not be willing to work with me on this, but then they don't really want me to do a good job on it anyway - they would really like it to be a half-baked job so that they could make a mockery of it.  In which case, why bother?  That brother is the one whose anger was abusive to  my mother, basically driving her to suicide.

The other brother is stuck in a small town that is his ex-wife's territory and where he'll always be a foreigner, so I don't envy him there, but he's stuck there while his kids are underage and he's tied to his business.  That brother is very controlling, and he has a history of physical abuse of his children, also, including the one with muscular dystrophy.

My brothers will probably visit each other, but if the one brother shows his anger much, I'm now sure how well that's going to go over with the other brother, because he's going to want to protect his sons.  His anger isn't anything compared to our other brother.  They could get in their mind they want to come down to see me, but I'm not going to allow that.  And the thing is that there's a guard station here at the condo complex so I could always disallow them to come in anyway.  The guard would call me and say that they were at the gate and should they be allowed in and I'd say "No" and the guard would send them away.

If I went to my hometown I might let my brother there know at some point and agree to meet with him there, maybe for lunch or something.  I woudn't stay with him though.

***

The other health thing is that my g.i. system is not working at all.  So I had to use my electrolyte refill prescription - that's the stuff you drink before a colonoscopy.  Pretty drastic stuff!  The last few days I've used heat, massage, enema every known trick under the sun besides everything and all the meds and supplements I already use... and nothing is working.  So I need to make an appointment with the g.i. doctor.  The thing is that whenever he does tests he never finds anything and it always ends out being neurological - from the spinal stenosis.  This, of course, is not a good thing, but I need to verify it with the g.i. doctor.  

You know what though?  It's because of all these health issues that I don't work and I was having so many problems with jobs here in the USA... (and I was concerned about poor career advancement possibilities in Russia! HAH! At least I had steady work in my field!)... So now I'm freed up to write my autobiography instead! Wheee! : Feel crummy > No work > Write autobiography

***

The next program of research in the text is:

"Corporate Culture: Culture as an Internal Variable"

"A second major way that culture and organization are linked is that used by researchers who recognize that organizations are themselves culture-producing phenomena... Organizatinos are seen as social instruments that produce goods and services, and, as a by-product, they also produce distinctive cultural artifacts such as rituals, legends, and ceremonies." (p. 344)

This really doesn't add much to what I've said elsewhere.  The idea of organizational culture being a by-product is interesting, however, and could reasonably fit the Vienna mission.  That's not to say that the culture as it was was a given, but that given the particular leadership and the particular make-up of the board and the member missions dictated the nature of the beast.

***

"Research with this conception of culture is generally based on a systems theory framework.  As such, it is concerned with articulating patterns of contingent relationships among collections of variables that appear to figure in organizational survival. Heretofore, typical variables considered in this research tradition were structure, size, technology, and leadership patterns." (p. 344)

I think systems theory is fascinating, although I don't know as much about it as I'd like.  It can be very useful in program evaluation.  But here we have researchers trying to understand organizations using a systems approach to try to pick up nuances of culture.  Doing it that way you'd pick up culture with a small "c" and I'm not sure how well systems theory is at picking up some of the nontangible aspects of culture, like attitudes and beliefs, so it would have its limits

As to the "organizational survival" issue, I thinjk I can say a few words about that too.  If you think about it, there are a bunch of nondenominational missions, more or less like that one in Vienna that have been around a long time.  Have they thought in terms or "organizational survival"?  Do they plan and make desicions based on organizational survival?  Is that a biblical mandate?  Is that something they should be striving for?  What if God doesn't really particularly want a bunch of stuffy old missions hanging around for decade upon decade?

In any case, it is certain that since the Vienna mission had taken mega big-time security precautions it seems pausible that there maybe have been some concern for "organizational survival," although there were other concerns as well resulting in the security precautions.

***

"Culture is usually defined as social or normative glue that holds an organization together... It expresses the values or social ideals and the beliefs that organization members come to share... These values or patterns of belief are manifested by symbolic devices such as myths... rituals stories..., and specialized language..." (p. 344)

This does make sense, and if it is true, then it's fairly easy to see why I couldn't have lasted with the mission - because I didn't have the "glue" that would hold me to the group.  That is, I didn't share significant aspects of the values and beliefs of the group.   And if it's true that these types of values, ideals, beliefs, etc. generally become manifested by symbolic devices as described in the text, then it's no wonder that I was confused so much of the time about what was going on!

***

"Culture, conceived as shared key values and beliefs, fulfills several functions.  First, it conveys a sense identity for organization members... Second, it facilitates the generation of commitment to something larger than the self... Third, culture enhances social system stability... And fourth, culture serves as a sense-making device that can guide and shape behavior." (p. 345-346)

This really sums up a lot and from this perspective it looks so easy.  I think I realized that by rejecting part of the value system I couldn't identify with the other members.  I might not have been able to say it in so many words, and I did still socialize with them.  But there was a growing wall between us.

I think for those who did come to share the values and beliefs of the mission their focus generally grew to be more on how to please the mission.

The culture would have played an important role in "social system stability", which would have been crucial for security concerns, especially.  And every time a new worker would come they'd have to go through the on-the-job training experience again, so they'd need the system to be as stable as possible.

The fourth function irks me.  I rather rebel against that kind of thing.  I'm not that crazy about anyone "guiding and shaping my behavior.  If I get a whiff of someone trying to to "guide and shape my behavior," especially surreptitiously, I want to know what's going on.  I think that generally I'm pretty amenable to reasonable requests (and even demands), but if there is something potentially unreasonable they want from me  I don't want someone uning underhanded ways to trying to go about getting it out of me.  And if they think I'm going to be an easy study, they might want to think again.  My kind unassuming exterior belies my intelligent and strong interior.  Try me.

***

 "Overall, the research agenda arising from the view that culture is an organizational variable is how to mold and shape internal culture in particular and how to change culture, consistent with managerial purposes.." (p. 346)

This was published in 1983, a few short years before I was in Vienna and before I faced the U.S. military chaplian/Vienna mission H.R. director that fateful day that ended out sending me back to the States for a few months just 5 months after I'd arrived in Vienna.    To refresh your memory about that meeting I must give you some background:

1.  I spent 4 months in Europe in 1981-2 including some time on my own as well as serving as a citizen delegate on a sister-city exchange, and on a study abroad program.

2. I spend 6 months in Europe in 1983 including: on a summer ministry, spending a week visiting a ministry I was interested in, studying Germin in Berlin (and volunteering several times a week at the Betheldiakonewerke, and visiting and making friends several times at a Lutheran seminary in East Berlin, etc.), and volunteering 6 weeks at the Society for the Study of Religion under Communism (aka Keston College) in England.

3.  I was attending an Austrian church in Vienna and doing just fine at the church

4.  I was not given any serious work to do at the mission, but the first couple months I was given software manuals to read when before I had come to Vienna I had offered to take a computer course if they'd tell me what software I would be using and they refused to tell me saying I could learn when I arrived.

5.  Contrary to the policy manual they wouldn't let me take my allotted months (1 month per pledged year of service) German upon arrival, saying there was too much work to do (!!).

There's a lot more I'm not telling you here but the gist of the matter is that I was facing a lot of stress, but it was not from being in Vienna, but it was from the mission.  I got along just fine in Vienna, to church, shopping, even signing up for classes by myself at the volkshochschule (a kind of adult school) and ordering a desk from Ikea when someone told me where it was.  Austria was not the problem the mission was.

So enter the H.R. director, and he has this handy dandy article with charts and everything showing how one has culture shock at certain months and so he diagnosed me right then and there with culture shock.  But if I had culture shock it was culture shock of the mission's culture not of Austria's culture.

But what does this have to do with the text?  I need to get back to the text.

The thing is that it seems as if the mission leadership might have all been reading this text, this paragraph with great eagerness and just waiting with baited breath for the research to come out that might help guide them in creating the most effective culture for their needs, because they somehow saw how culture was vital for their work, for their purposes.  So it's very possible that my boss and his boss and some of the board of director read some of these articles...

... except, it would seem, the H. R. director.  I say that because If he had read these he would have known that it was not the Austrian culture that was the problem but the mission!  But he didn't know!  So somehow he didn't have the same awareness of organizational culture as the others in the administration and he thought the problems I was facing was culture shock as in the usual adaptation in a move to a new country.

However, it does seem a little strange that an H.R. director wouldn't know about organizational culture, but you have to remember that at the mission we didn't have the usual orientation process that you might think an H.R. department would organization, and which would include elements of organizational culture.

***

 I'm sorry this took so long to get out.  I actually wrote it over several days.  I've had a lot going on and a few health issues as well as some things  sort of bringing up family things again.   Overall my lumbar stenosis (basically the whole lumbar is one big mild to moderate stenosis), is getting worse.

My cousin told me more details about my brother's anger but she thinks we should all (me and my brothers) be all re-united sometime - even though she think they have such low view of women.  I don'd want to be re-united with them and have them think that I condone that and have them care for me in my old age.  But I don't have anyone.  I need to find someone to be my 1) living will designee, 2) executor, and 3) benefactor (for various things).

It just kills me to think mom put up with my brother's abuse and she would have received a lot more respect from me but everone was afraid that I'd take all her money, which makes me mad and I want to just let them all go their own way if that's what they think of me.  My cousing made a jab sort of along those lines too when I showed her my calender in case my brothers are saying I'm just going to the beach all day (which mom said once and I think she was just parroting them) and she responded that it was fortunate that I had enough money to affort such good care (my cousing said that).  So I corrected her that since I'm on disability (SSDI) I have medicare (a medicare advantage plan) and medicaid (for being "medically needy" - i.e., being on SSDI), so I don't have to pay that much, but I do have to shop around to find providers that take my insurance.

With friends like that who needs enemies?  Well, the thing is that dad is the one who defined who I was for the family from the time I went to Vienna, and ultimately I think that came from him.  At any rate, it didn't from that cousin.  I suspect she heart it from my brother there - the one that was abusive to my mom.

325. Organizational Behavior, Pt. 49 (Smircich, pt. 2)

I went to home group tonight.  My feet are bothering me, but I'm glad I went. All the home groups are discussing "Crazy Love" this year.

***

The first "program of research" is

"Culture and Comparative Management: Culture as Independent Variable"

"The field of comparative management is concerned with variation in managerial and employee practices and attitudes across countries... The literature can be segmented into that with a macro focus, examining the relationship between culture and organization structure, and that with a micro focus, investigating the similarities and differences in attitudes of managers of different cultures." (p. 343)

Maybe this would explain my "culture shock" in Vienna, the fact that the mission was using a form of management style that was quite different than that which I was used to back home.  However, if that was the case, then it would need to be determined which "culture" theire form of management represented.  Was it Austrian?  Was it some sort of Eastern European?  Or maybe it was military, influenced by the chaplains on staff?  Or was it a unique East European mission style of management?  Or maybe it was not something so much unique to East European missions as unique to the spy (aka intelligence) world? 

Then why was the different so intractible between me and the mission and not between the others and the mission?  It would have been very nice to have had researchers therre at the time to answer these questions, but, alas, there werern't, and I highly doubt the mission would have allowed there to be (or at least would have allowed there to be with trued freedom of investigation).

***

"The literature is extensive and has been subjected to several major reviews and critiques... 


These works share a conception of the organization-culture relationship... Culture is treated as an independent variable; it is imported into the organization through the membership.  Its presence is believed to be revealed in the patterns of attitudes and actions of individual organization members...

 Characterized broadly, the research agenda deriving from this view is to chard the differences among cultures, locate clusters of similarities, and draw implications for organizational effectiveness..."  (p. 343)

The issue here would appear speak to how management could appropriately manage employees of different cultures and/or in different cultural settings.  However, for the Vienna mission, I don't think that was their concern; rather, it was more intent on making the employee fit the management's predetermined culture than trying to accommodate the missionary's cultural background.  This was, undoubtedly part of its being a total institution, and the writers of this journal article and the other articles discussed in the article probably didn't include total institutions in their works.  In any case, this first research program doesn't fit the Vienna mission, so we'll have to see if any of the others do, or if it's the same thing for all of them.

***

I have to run now to get ready for an appointment.

251. Organizational Behavior File, Pt. 3 (Ouchi, pt. 1)

I just posted a very long list of terms used in this blog up to the end of the Socialization file posts. I hope someone finds it useful. I've been working on that, which is why I haven't posted so much these past couple days. Next I want to work on a list of Scripture passages quoted and referenced in my posts. That'll be a lot easier though.

***

This next article is:

Ouchi, William G. (1979, Sept.). A conceptual framework for the design of organizational control mechanisms. Management Science, 25(9), 833-848.

***

"This paper considers a more simple-minded view of organizational control stated in the following two questions: What are the mechanisms through which an organization can be managed so that it moves towards its objectives? How can the design of these mechanisms be improved, and what are the limits of each basic design?" (p. 833)

This seems straightforward enough. First, however, one needs to identify the objectives, I think, because that will make a difference in what kinds of controls to choose, right?

The objective of the mission basically, was to equip indigenous church leaders in Eastern Europe.

***

I'm skipping over market and bureaucratic mechanisms, because they don't provide anything helpful (in trying to understand the Vienna mission.

"Consider the foreman in the warehouse. His task is to oversee the work of pickers and packers. How is the warehouse manager to evaluate the work of the foreman? To some extent, he can rely on bureaucratic mechanisms such as output schedules, budgets, and inventory rules, but these in turn require surveillance. Given that the task of the foreman is significantly more subtle than that of the picker, the manager's task of bureaucratically supervising the foreman becomes very complex. However, if the manager is capable of selecting for promotion to foreman only that subset of workers who display a high internal commitment to these objectives, then his need for explicit surveillance and evaluation is reduced. In short, once the manager knows that they are trying to achieve the 'right' objectives, he can eliminate many costly forms of auditing and surveillance." (p. 836-7)

It might take a bit more by way of mental gymnastics to apply this to the Vienna mission context. But, since this text seems to start with the difficulties of oversight, I'll take that approach too. What would the difficulties of oversight have been for the Vienna mission?

Per me: I don't think I would have been that difficult to "oversee" in the usual sense of the term because it should be readily recognizable if I was filing everything wrong or making a lot of typos in my letters, for example. So from that standpoint a bureaucratic control of me should have sufficed. But the thing is that you have to add in the security issue.

Since the security issue was organization-wide (albeit with different positions have their own peculiar nuances), I'm going to consider the security issue in general.

How could the mission realistically make sure that its workers were complying with the security expectations (written and otherwise, spoken and otherwise)? One possibility would be to post cameras all over the building and having the evil military chaplain h.r. director (or his assistant) sit all day and watch the cameras. However, you might also want to get audio recordings, so there should be bugs in all the rooms and phones too, which would keep the evil h.r. director busy all day (unless he hadn't delegated camera duty to his assistant, in which case the assistant would monitor the bugs).

But then you still would have the issue of what happens when people leave the office. One possibility would be to just not let them leave the office, but keep them safely tucked away under close surveillance. And I suspect the theologians on staff would not have been sufficiently developed to mind these precautions at all, but would have just readily complied for the sake of security, which everyone knew was of utmost importance.

But the Austrian authorities might get suspicious if no one ever came out of the building, and then you have to deal with the schnitzel delivery guy... And heaven forbid someone from the States might come visiting.

No, so even if the theologians would have been okay with this set up, I have a sneaky suspicion it would have been problematic at some point in the process.

Another alternative would be to take a cue from the Soviets. They had something called an informant system in place, and this was so to one degree or another in all the Warsaw Pact countries. In this set up, what you would do is just recruit a few members of the organization to be snitches. And since no one would know who the snitches were, they'd be careful around any other staff members. And the organization could have a policy of everyone having to do everything with another staff member (maybe this is why the practice got started of women not being able to go to the restroom alone in public places - if you're not aware of this American custom it's just that women always go in droves to the restroom, such as at a restaurant).

The problem with this is that it would foster a climate of distrust, and the mission wouldn't go for that because it would make it hard to work together. Also, if anyone figured out who the snitches were they might find a way to do things in groups with no snitches amongst them. These are theologians, after all, and they're sometimes clever. You never know.

No, this text, I think provides about the only way possible to control the workers in the Vienna mission. But the thing is, as far as I'm concerned, just how much controlling should be done? How likely is it that people who have studied for their profession and then spent a year or more to raise support all just to work with the mission would become a traitor and betray the organization? And who would they betray the mission to, anyway? Their whole work was with believers in Communist countries, some of whom paid a heavy price for their faith - would the workers then go tell the Communists about the organization? I hardly think so!

But then there's the issue of Vienna being the hotbed of spies it was. So let's say that someone might accidentally tell a spy something about the mission. Does that mean that everyone should stay cloistered in their homes after work? Or maybe just hang out among themselves or maybe just with native English speakers?

The point is, how far are you going to take this? I've already written at some length about how the mission shouldn't have been so paranoid anyway and forsaken Scriptural teaching for the sake of security. But I wouldn't necessarily say they couldn't have any security precautions at all. I would say they should have rational security kept in perspective. That is, it shouldn't be an obsession and there should be more living by faith. Face it, no one can control everything in their lives. Like, I could go out and get hit by a car tomorrow. Or you could. Right?

Also, besides the Scriptural reasons, and besides the psychological ones (i.e., paranoia), I think there's also a justice issue. That is the mission shouldn't have had the right to treat it's own members the way they did just for the sake of security. In their system, where you had to just trust them on very limited knowledge, without questioning, and go along with everything. In that kind of a set up the individual is just an object, a thing that is controlled and acted upon but has no self-determination.

Anyway, let's go on.

***

This next section is mainly of interest in helping to understand the different social entities involved:

"When these socialization processes characterize groups such as physicians or nurses who occupy different organizations but with similar values, we refer to them as professions. When the socialization process refers to all of the citizens of a political unit, we refer to it as a culture. When it refers to the properties of a unique organization, we may refer to it as a clan. The functions of socialization are similar in professions, cultures, and clans, but our present interest centers on the clan." (p. 837)

Like I say, this text mainly is helpful for defining the differences between socialization in professions, cultures, or organizations.

***

"It is possible to arrange the three modes of control along each of two dimensions: the informational requirements necessary to operate each control type, and the social underpinnings necessary to operate each control type." (p. 837)

I'll just sum up the table.

Market control requires information about prices, and the social requirements are the norms of reciprocity.

Bureaucracy control requires information about prices and rules, and the social requirements are norm of reciprocity and legitimate authority.

Clan control requires information about prices, rules and traditions, and the social requirements are norm reciprocity, legitimate authority, and shared values and beliefs.

***

"A Clan requires not only a norm of reciprocity and the idea of legitimate authority (often of the 'traditional' rather than the 'rational/legal' form), but also social agreement on a broad range of values and beliefs. Because the clan lacks the explicit price mechanism of the market and the explicit rules of the bureaucracy, it relies for its control upon a deep level of common agreement between members on what constitutes proper behavior, and it requires a high level of commitment on the part of each individual to those socially prescribed behaviors. Clearly, a clan is more demanding than either a market or a bureaucracy in terms of the social agreements which are prerequisite to its successful operation." (p. 838)

The thing that I've been stumped on is how the mission could get its members to agree on all the things it demanded from them? Of course, I haven't definitively shown that everyone had the same rules to live by as me, but assuming they did, and I never did anything against the mission but that still wasn't enough, what were they willing to agree with the mission on that evidently went beyond what I was doing? (or else, if I didn't get the treatment I did because of my own actions, then why did I get the treatment I did by the mission?)

It seems to me, too, that there could be a wide range of understanding as to what the "norm of reciprocity", "legitimate authority" and "shared values, beliefs" entail. For example, does reciprocity only encompass my at-work activities? If not, then what else does it include? Likewise, what type authority are we talking about and what is it authority over? Are we talking dictatorial authority? Are we talking dictatorial authority over my whole life? Then there's the issues of shared values, beliefs. What are these beliefs about and how all-encompassing are they? Maybe you can guess, if you've been following along at all, that the Vienna mission apparently took as much liberty as was possible in these "social requirements".

***

I've got this article all marked up and we've only just begun, but it's late and so I'm going to leave off for now.

207. Socialization File, Pt. 89 (Roberts, pt. 6)

This next piece of text is from the sub-section "Culture as Symbolic Interaction." If you do a search of this blog, you'll see that I've addressed symbolic interactionism a couple times already.

"An amalgam of culture as shared norms and values, myths and stories, and rites and ceremonials is achieved by looking at organizations in terms of symbolic interaction (Pfeffer, 1981). From this perspective, managers provide explanations, rationalizations, and legitimation for the activities of the organization. Indeed, one writer sees management essentially as such an activity: 'Managerial work can be viewed as managing myth, symbols, and labels ... Because managers traffic so often in images, the appropriate role for the manager may be evangelist rather than accountant' (Weick, 1979, p. 42). For managers to evangelize, there must be shared norms and values, which are manifested in the myths, rites and ceremonials." (p. 128)

Without comparing this to other potential takes on management, I would say that this view of the management role fits pretty well in the Vienna mission context, as I experienced it. Actually, I'm trying to remember who did the more "accountant" type of work in the mission. I think it probably was mostly handled out of the U.S. office except that the Vienna director's secretary probably took care of the routine expenses in Vienna, such as rent and utilities and the like. But at any rate, the leaders, including the director of the U.S. office of the mission, played very hands-on and even decisive "evangelist" roles. For example, and I think I've mentioned this before, at group meetings they held the reins at large group meetings. They would step back for different people to give their reports but it was like the leadership gave the person temporary space to talk, but the leader would take it back again afterwards and his comments in response would set the tenor for the whole group. Or sometimes the leadership would banter back and forth before the group or the leader might pull up another earlier event, but through all this the leadership was very much in charge and set the tenor and the example as to what was acceptable and what might be less so. But it was all done in a very congenial and apparently transparent and accessible way. You might say they were even leading by example through this kind of public interaction.

[4/9/11 comment: I remembered that there was an accountant on staff. I was trying to remember what was on the far right end of the hall of the second floor and that's when I remembered that his office was beyond my boss's (from the perspective of coming up the stairs and looking down the hall).]

***
This comes at the end of the same sub-section as the text above:

"The symbolic approach to culture is particularly visible in organizations in which reliability rather than productivity is the bottom line because the costs of error can be catastrophic. Examples are nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, and complex weapons systems. A major aspects of these organizations is requisite variety, in which the complexities of the system and its operators must match the complexity required by the technology (Weick, 1987). High accountability and simultaneous centralization and flexibility are also part of the culture of these organizations (Roberts, Rousseau, and La Porte, in press)." (p. 130; bold in original)

I've already dealt some with high-reliability firms and I think there was an article or two also on high-technology firms, so I've discussed the differences between these types of organizations and the Vienna mission already, at least to some extent. It wasn't, for example, like we were running the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, for example, but the mission had a need for complete accuracy to avoid unnecessary any problems with the work in the Communist countries.

So this pressure and felt need for carefulness resulted in a similar kind of setting in which "reliability" was much more important than "productivity." Part of the distinction, I think, was also caused by the fact that "productivity" was mostly pretty predictable. That is, there was a process place that saw the textbooks from text-writing (or before that even) to publication and dissemination. The reliability part came into play regarding our location in Vienna, the then "spy capital of the world", working in countries that didn't really want us there, etc. Plus, there were a lot of things that couldn't really be predicted that could happen once you were actually doing something in the country, in one of the Communist countries. Anything could mess you up, such as some unknown disruption of transportation service that makes it hard to get to the next place you'd be teaching at, or maybe there was a last minute change as to where you'd be teaching, but you had no way of knowing that, and on and on. And all the time you had to not let on that you were a foreigner or doing Christian work. So in-country is where all the variables became big question marks and might have been difficult to foresee and impossible to control or do anything about. It wasn't like you were having troubles with the supplier of the paper for publishing the textbooks in the USA and you could just go out and try to find another one, even though that kind of thing also had the potential to be a disruption to the ministry.

Regarding complexity (mentioned in the text in the context of "complex weapons systems"), the mission had some complexity as far as relationships were concerned, both within and outside the mission, and part of this was intentional as a part of the security system (although maybe it wasn't complex to insiders, especially insiders closest to the apparently complex relationship(s)), but the biggest complexity was in the external environment, which is not necessarily the same as the environmental ambiguity described above, but maybe could be considered part of the ambiguity. But the complexity also included the juxtaposition of the mission between the various member missions involved in our work as well as relations with nationals and others. There were also relations that might be looked at as more static (oversight - board members; target nationals - students) and those that were more integrally part of the process from inception of a course idea to delivery of textbooks and instruction. And all of these different relationships involved different security requirements. We may not have necessarily have had such complexity of "technology" but I think the complexity of the mission's security efforts could be seen as their version of the "complex technology" factor.

All this is to say that reliability was more important than productivity, because of the ambiguities and complexities of external relations and environment, including an element of hostility towards our work (by the Communist governments) which also varied from country to country. So the symbolic approach to culture played a vital role in the mission's basic functioning and in its security measures.

***

This is rather a short post (for me), but I'd rather not start in on the next section, as there's a lot there to comment on. So I'll pick up from here next time.