Symbolic Communication: Signifying Calls and the Police Response.

This first major empirical work on the semiotics of social action goes a long way toward answering substantive, theoretical 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, needs by focusing on how police handle calls from the public, how they ascertain what a call means what should be done with it, how this is transformed through subsystems within the organization, Peter Manning a novel way of looking at organizational communication.Symbolic 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 recodings ensuring a continuous loose linkage of organization environment). Manning shows why the police act in ways that differ from the way citizens 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.Peter K. Manning is a Professor of Psychiatry of Sociology at Michigan State University a member of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford. brings to fruition themes ideas introduced in his previous books, Police Work and The Narc's Game. Symbolic Communication is included in the Organization Studies series, edited by John van Maanen.