Ethnographic assessment of the Coast Guard Reserve Personnel Management Officers Evaluation Systems

¶ … Reserve Personnel Management Systems Division: Officer Evaluations

This paper engages in a thorough assessment of the culture, organization and technology of the reserve personnel management that operates as a branch within the Personnel Service Center of the United States Coast Guard: specifically the Officers Evaluation Systems. The method used to assess this particular branch relies heavily on ethnographic skills and related techniques. According to the official website of the U.S. Coast Guard, this is the division which handles "boards, panels, promotions, evaluations, advancements, retirements, resignations, discharges and separations for all reserve officer, chief warrant officers, and enlisted members" (uscg.mil, 2013). This is the division which deals with assignments, copies of records, medical issues and disability, individual ready reserve, promotions, separations, reserve retirement requests, policy waives and a host of other connected factors.

By scrutinizing closely factors like culture, organization, technology and related issues, one is able to obtain an accurately precise snapshot of the trends which keep this the division running smoothly, or which hinder it. One is able to capture a better ethnographic picture using qualitative means of how this particular branch of the coast guard operates, on paper and in reality. Ultimately, the finding demonstrated to the fact that aside from their adversarial view of technology, this was an ethically responsible and proactive division.

Culture

As MacKenzie explains, culture is simply what people do. It the behavior of individuals within a group, or pockets of groups within society as a whole. As MacKenzie has found, financial markets have their own culture, and the examination of what that culture is can help us to understand the fluctuations and vagaries of financial markets as whole -- as one will be able to understand the factors which are influencing them. MacKenzie's research findings can be summarized as thus: "There is evidence, therefore, that a notion of 'evaluation culture', conceptualized as above, might be applicable to the analysis of behaviour in the financial markets. One reason why this is an attractive possibility is that the political valence of an application of this kind of the concept of 'culture' differs from the situation that gave rise to suspicion of the concept: a situation in which the society from which the researcher comes is more powerful than the society he or she studies. Research on financial markets is 'studying up' (Nader 1974): on any ordinary criterion of power, those who are studied are more powerful than the researcher" (2011, p.20). What MacKenzie appears to be proposing is that within these complex financial markets, of recent times, the culture appears to be dominated heavily by the ability to scrutinize. But even so, MacKenzie alludes to the fact that the mere act of researching a specific pocket of society lends itself to the danger of making it appear more powerful than the society from which it originates. That was not a danger that I ran into when I was examining neither the RPM division of the Coast Guard nor the specific facet of Officers Evaluation Systems. The difference here may have largely stemmed from the fact that I was examining professional culture within a government/military organization, and within the military it's very difficult for one faction to appear more powerful than others, as there's a strong pervading mentality that all factions are just cogs within the greater machine.

Interestingly enough, I did find that the RPM division had a sense which evoked the "evaluation culture" which MacKenzie alluded to so strongly, but that this was not treated as something which was an anomaly. As a result of the fact that this department is a faction of the U.S. Military as a whole, there's a strong sense of burden and obligation to follow the set structure of the previous decades and to fully embrace the U.S. Military culture and code of conduct, along with an overt sense of assessment to ensure that this is continuing to happen. This aspect of the culture within the organization was also no doubt aggravated by the fact that they deal with a ton of administrative work, which forces them to have a heightened perspective of rules and protocol not just for their department but for the members of the Coast Guard that they're interacting.

Technology

One aspect of the means by which technology, the use of technology and the treatment of technology are viewed within this particular department generally orbit around a certain degree over veneration and esteem. There is a complete ignorance of how technology and Marx's famous essay where he somewhat discredit the blind notion that the evolution of technology equaled the evolution of society. As Marx aptly stated, "Does improve technology mean progress? Yes, it certainly could mean just that. But only if we are willing and able to answer the next question" progress toward what? What is that we want our new technologies to accomplish? What do we want beyond such immediate, limited goals as achieving efficiencies, decreasing financial costs, and eliminating the troubling human element from our workplaces? In the absence of answers to these questions, technological improvements may very well turn out to be incompatible with genuine, that is to say social, progress" (Marx, 1987, p.41). Within the department that I was observed, there was a very strong notion and belief in the fact that the development of technology was an undeniable sign of progress. The reality is that if one examines this closely, it's easy to see that within the U.S. military, technology is only succeeding in helping us to become more adversarial. It's not helping us to learn more languages faster or to communicate more successfully with one another. Rather it's being used as a means for engaging in combat and surveillance in a more effective and pervasive manner. Technology could be used to help forge a more peaceful society where equality more overtly prevails and all civilians feel as though they're living with a heightened amount of justice and importance, however, this is just not the case.

While it's true that within the Coast Guard, the RPM is harnessing technology as a means of keeping better track of records, engaging in better record-keeping and research and using it to do its job in a more thorough and sophisticated manner, this isn't necessarily true of the U.S. Military as a whole. In fact, if one were to examine the bigger picture, the RPM is in its own way contributing to the adversarial nature of the U.S. Military. By using technology to do their job more accurately and effectively, the RPM division is empowering the greater military to engage in their actions more effectively -- which happen to be action characterized by a greater degree of adversarial qualities. A great example of this on a much larger scale was the advent of nuclear power. As Pool demonstrates so many scientists offer a range of differing insights on how this promising and controversial power fell so flat; many of these viewpoints orbit around the fact that nuclear power was continually envisioned and used for destruction (1997).

This is a particularly disturbing finding if one is to consider Westrum's book, "Technologies and Society" which fundamentally makes the argument that people and societies evolve together, something which could indeed improve the use and understanding of technology (1990). "The book opens with a review of the history of our understanding of the relationships between culture, social organization, and technology. This ranges from Marx's emphasis on the inherent political content of technologies to the autonomous and deterministic theory of technology propounded by William F. Ogburn in the early 1920's to the presently growing influence of the view that technologies are 'socially constructed'" (Sanders, 1992). By showing us things like the evolution of milk bottles and parking meters and how these forms of technology were really just strong manifestations of our own needs, Westrum makes a solid case for the fact that society and technology co-exist and co-evolve. This is disturbing when juxtaposed in conjunction with the fact that our weapons are becoming more destructive, our ability to survey one another is becoming more pervasive. As technology is able to observe and destroy its people with a greater level of ease, the people who harness this technology are able to engage in these actions more readily. There's a greater level of aggression and with it, perceived hostility. Thus, adversarial actions demonstrated on the news and relayed to this department from internal factions are thus treated as necessary and at times even ideal.

Organizational Culture

One aspect of this organization's organization culture that has served it well is that it has always managed to co-evolve with the technology, particularly the software technology that it has been presented with. Upon observation, one of the overwhelming reasons why this has been the case, is because the leaders of this division have made it an unequivocal priority to highlight the importance of technology and staying current with the developments that software and the computer systems make. Because the leaders of this division set these standards so high, everyone who works under them in RPM also mimics this commitment to technology and the importance of technology. In the last ten years, this department has gone through several software systems for record keeping and for the processing of the numerous amounts of data that their division goes through each month, or even each day. The leaders of this department have a heightened understanding of their sheer obligation to commit strongly to technology and to be able to handle it in a manner that allows them to control it in a reliable fashion. In fact, this department not only takes a great deal of pride in being able to master the current technology that they need to use daily, but they have a strong commitment to predicting where the technology is going in the future so that they can be ready and prepared for it.

On top of that, they have a close working relationship with the programmers that they use and have used for the last 15 years: there's a strong sense of trust and open lines of communication, something that this department attributes their success with technology to. These factors are something that even the federal government could learn from, if they were willing. For instance, nearly everyone knows about the failure of the Virtual Case File with the FBI government and how the contractor used for this (ultimately failed) database, delivered 700,000 lines of code that were essentially bug ridden and dysfunctional, that the entire project had to be scrapped: this was no small loss that was taken: this was a $170 million project (Goldstein, 2005). However, as experts have claimed, the software contractors are not the only ones to blame; the FBI shares its own share in the blame, because they lack several qualities that the RPM division makes it their business to have and to cultivate: IT management and technical expertise (Goldstein, 2005). "In a devastating 81-page audit, released in 2005, Glenn A. Fine, the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general, described eight factors that contributed to the VCF's failure. Among them: poorly defined and slowly evolving design requirements; overly ambitious schedules; and the lack of a plan to guide hardware purchases, network deployments, and software development for the bureau" (Goldstein, 2005). The RPM believes (and rightly so, that they will never suffer from this type of embarrassment because they engage in a high level of personal responsibility when it comes to the development and use of technology. The FBI needs to engage in a strict examination of the failures that contributed to this embarrassment to ensure that they are never repeated (Israel, 2012).

Accidents

The organizational culture of this particular faction of the Coast Guard was overwhelmingly manifested by the notion of individual and shared responsibility. It was very apparent that all members who worked in this arena felt a strong sense of duty and responsibility to the members of the Coast Guard that they worked with, as well as to the Coast Guard at large, to the U.S. Military, to the nation and to all civilians. This was indeed a very reassuring finding, as a failure to realize the level of one's responsibility to others can too quickly manifest in tragic manners through either shoddy or careless work. For example, when considering the Challenger disaster, one scholar aptly points out, "Engineers have a responsibility that goes far beyond the building of machines and systems. We cannot leave it to the technical illiterates, or even to literate and overloaded technical administrators to decide what is safe and for the public good. We must tell what we know, first through normal administrative channels, but when these fail, through whatever avenues we can find. Many claim that it is disloyal to protest. Sometimes the penalty disapproval, loss of status, even Vilification -- can be severe" (Boisjoy, 2013). However, as Boisjoy illuminates, there need to be a greater number of critical pronouncements and declarations as a means of serving mankind and preserving our freedom (Boisjoy, 2013). Luckily within the RPM division there was no failure or reluctance to speak out if concerns, or other such issues manifested themselves in concerning or jarring ways: there was no culture of silence, just an overwhelming sense of responsibility to the greater good. This is important, not just to fulfill their sense of responsibility, but it shows that they have an understanding of the tragedies that can ensue when departments are not acting in the most responsible manner possible.

The Challenger disaster is one which is an unfortunate example of this: this disaster was avoidable. It absolutely did not have to happen, but it did happen as a result of the collective failures of a range of departments: "The Commission has concluded that neither Thiokol nor NASA responded adequately to internal warnings about the faulty seal design. Furthermore, Thiokol and NASA did not make a timely attempt to develop and verify a new seal after the initial design was shown to be deficient" (nasa.gov ).

The RPM division has personally had such a low level of accidents in part because it mostly deals with electronic record-keeping as the bulk of its duties and all subsequent duties are related to this aspect. Perrow makes a strong case for the fact that complex interactions do not necessarily make a system more accident prone. Rather, it has to do with the understanding of these interactions, the ability to control these interactions and the amount of hidden interactions present (Perrow, 2011). RPM prides itself in being able to balance and understand all of these aspects as part of the fundamental reasons for its success.

Ethics: Privacy

One way that ethics manifests itself in this particular division is via the protection of data. Computers and the computer age present their own unique code of ethics and responsibility. For the RPM, this manifests most strongly in protecting their data and stating clear confidentiality standards along with privacy standards. The RPM division prides itself on the fact that everyone that works within this branch is on the same page when it comes to ethical and privacy standards: this is mostly as a result of a high level of communication within the department. "On my view, computer ethics is a dynamic and complex field of study which considers the relationships among facts, conceptualizations, policies and values with regard to constantly changing computer technology. Computer ethics is not a fixed set of rules which one shellacs and hangs on the wall. Nor is computer ethics the rote application of ethical principles to a value-free technology. Computer ethics requires us to think anew about the nature of computer technology and our values. Although computer ethics is a field between science and ethics and depends on them, it is also a discipline in its own right which provides both conceptualizations for understanding and policies for using computer technology" (Moor, 1985). Moor is indeed correct about the necessity of computer ethics and their own uniqueness. Moreover, these are ethical standards which are constantly evolving as the technology in turn is constantly evolving. The RPM division, through their concerted responsibility, self-education and pro-action regarding technology, has made computer ethics just another facet of their duties which involve the usage and preservation of data for the public good (Howard, 2012).

Interview

Question: What is your opinion about Officer Evaluations?

OERs tells us how an officer is doing/performing. This performance can also fluctuate, depending on a duty station. For example, an officer with an engineer background may not perform as well as those who have a business management background in an administration environment.

Question: In your opinion, does an OER track what it necessary?

Yes, it does, but it needs improvement. Some of the standards can become repetitive at times.

Question: Are there things that are missing on an OER?

Yes, sometimes some of the marks may not apply to the specifics of one's job. For example, again, and engineer working in an engendering position doesn't always reflect specific aspects of their jobs in an OER, and vice versa for someone working in an administrative position.

Question: What are some of the technologies you use to process OERs?

We use a coast guard wide system called direct access to input members' data in their service record. We also use another application called "the action tracker" and this is just a data base we use in the office to keep track of the status of an OER. It tells us if its sent back to the unit for corrections or if our reviewing officer is reviewing it, before it get sent to the next stage.

Question: Do you feel that technology supports or restricts your jobs. How does it impact everyone else?

Sometimes it can restrict, because the system slows down when the west coast people start getting into the system. We are 3 hrs ahead in the east coast. So the system is more responsive early in the mornings.

Another restriction is when the system goes through upgrades. This happens every six months, when "Direct access" needs to be updated.

Also, sometimes the system goes down, and this tends to intervene with the amount of work one could be doing during that time.

Question: How does someone learn how to do this job?

For the most part, following the Standard operation procedure manual (SOPs), but there are also other manuals such as the "officer accessions, evaluations and promotions manual, and the commandants instruction manual.

This job is not easy, because it requires a lot of attention. There is nothing fun about it, it is tedious most of the time. The only distraction you may have is talking with your co-workers.

Summary

If anything, this interview, in conjunction with all the other data that has been presented demonstrates how many of the tasks of the RPM are concerted around the necessity of duty. Many of the tasks completed by this division are either difficult or dull: however, they still need to be completed in order to better serve the Coast Guard and the nation as a whole, and to be completed in a sound and ethical manner. This paper has demonstrated through the qualitative research engaged in with this particular department and the Officers Evaluation Systems is that there is strong attention to detail, ethics and shared responsibility. These are some of the fundamental pillars for the success of the organization and branch of the Coast Guard.