This first major empirical work on the semiotics of social action goes a long waytoward answering substantive, theoretical and pragmatic questions on how codes actually operate in aspecific social setting. It underscores the important yet often ignored role of the police as "sign"or "information workers."Calls to the police represent a rich variety of human troubles, concerns,and needs by focusing on how police handle calls from the public, how they ascertain what a callmeans and what should be done with it, and how this is transformed through subsystems within theorganization, Peter Manning provides a novel way of looking at organizational communication.SymbolicCommunication provides examples of how members of an organization interpret their environment - inthis instance, how the meaning of a call to the police is transformed as it moves across theboundaries of the organization (a transformation that involves a series of codings and recodingsensuring a continuous loose linkage of organization and environment). Manning shows why the policeact in ways that differ from the way citizens and politicians would have them act, revealing theuncertainties that surround a policy agency's responsiveness. And he points out how today's computertechnologies constrain the coding process, limiting in particular the effectiveness of the 911systems used in most of our major cities.Peter K. Manning is a Professor of Psychiatry and ofSociology at Michigan State University and a member of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford.Symbolic Communication brings to fruition themes and ideas introduced in his previous books, PoliceWork and The Narc's Game. Symbolic Communication is included in the Organization Studies series,edited by John van Maanen.
This first major empirical work on the semiotics of social action goes a long way toward answering substantive, theoretical and pragmatic questions on how codes actually operate in a specific social setting.
