Symbolic Communication

by Peter K. Manning

"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 lin