Institutionalized Contradictions: Trouble in a Colonial Mission

Abstract

The Basel Mission is a Pietist evangelical organization that was active in many areas of the colonial world in the nineteenth century, including the Gold Coast of West Africa, now known as Ghana. The Mission's impact was strong in spite of policies that discouraged creativity and undermined interpersonal trust among the missionaries. Its troubles and its persistence came from the same source, namely, a distinctive structure of authority that was anchored simultaneously in charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal understandings about discipline. This interpretive study isolates the elective affinities among beliefs, experiences, and interests that enabled the Mission to construct and reproduce that complicated structure; it describes the central contradictions that emerged out of the structure; and it documents how the organization survived despite those contradictions. The research encourages comparisons with missions and other kinds of commitment organizations that are participants in other historical circumstances.