Symbolic Communication

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. 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 call means and what should be done with it, and how this is transformed through subsystems within the organization, Peter Manning provides a novel way of looking at organizational communication. Symbolic Communication provides examples of how members of an organization interpret their environment - in this instance, how the meaning of a call to the police is transformed as it moves across the boundaries of the organization (a transformation that involves a series of codings and recodings ensuring a continuous loose linkage of organization and environment).

Manning shows why the police act in ways that differ from the way citizens and politicians would have them act, revealing the uncertainties that surround a policy agency's responsiveness. And he points out how today's computer technologies constrain the coding process, limiting in particular the effectiveness of the 911 systems used in most of our major cities. Symbolic Communication is included in the Organization Studies series, edited by John van Maanen.