Manning, Peter K. 1986. Texts as Organizational Echoes

7/28/2019 Manning, Peter K. 1986. Texts as Organizational Echoes

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Texts as Organizational EchoesAuthor(s): Peter K. ManningSource: Human Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, Interaction and Language Use (1986), pp. 287-302Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20008972 .

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Human Studies 9: 287-302 (1986).? Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.

Texts as organizational echoes

PETER K. MANNINGCentre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford University, Oxford OX2 6UD, U.K.

Introduction

Although the notion of social context has great appeal and is related to a familyof concepts with enduring explanatory power such as thick description (Geertz,1973), group and grid (Douglas, 1970), elaborated and restricted codes (Bern?stein, 1973) and field, tenor and code (Halliday, 1979), it remains a rathervague and mercurial concept. Itwould appear to reference aspects of the socialpsychological world of the speaker and the hearer which in addition to a mes?sage are a necessary feature of meaningful communication (see Ochs, 1979, cit?ed inLevinson, 1983: 23). Conversational analysis, which has been most speci?fically concerned to specify the work of context in producing meaningful talk,relies on rather implicit notions, although the work of Sacks includes attentionto setting specific-meanings or categorizations (Sacks and Garfinkel, 1970;Sacks, 1967).

The role of context is obviously crucial in organized settings which daily pro?cess a large number of calls from the public. Calls may be as brief as thirty sec?onds, provide a bare minimum of information, and yet require rapid decisionsinvolving allocation of personnel, equipment and resources to a reportedtrouble. Because in police, fire and emergency services, telephone calls whichomit non-verbal signs normally accompanying speech are the primary meansof communication, common-sense knowledge of behaviour, along with organ?ization-specific occupational and organizational culture (Barley, 1983) is usedto fill in, construct, and infer meanings. These calls and their interpretation arecontext-dependent communication, and their analysis should permit a furtherexplication of the relevance of context to organizational communications. '

Organizations are formally constituted systems for the processing of communicational units utilizing set technology, a structure of roles and tasks, sys?tems of encoding and decoding meaning, and interpretative practices (seeMan

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ning, 1982, 1985, forthcoming). From the diversity of messages produced bythe public, they must introduce routine, regularity, consistency; they mustreadily convert equivocal and uncertain messages (nature) into organizational?ly actionable work (culture).

Communicational units, such as messages, records, memos and aide m??moires, are sanctioned within an organization, normalized and marked tominimize equivocation, noise and ambiguity. As such, they are selectively as?sembled sets of signs or information formed to introduce variation that isman?ageable as well as relatively non-problematic processing. Written records ofcalls to the police, the focus here, are texts which have an organizational realitystabilized by recursive processing within the same communicational system.The process of converting everyday language in which calls to the police aretransformed into organizational texts is a matter of seeing these messages ashaving components, encoding these components into the system of classifica?tion of the organization, transmitting the messages through the organizationand producing action outcomes.

The written texts which are assembled, such as a call about a burglary, maycontain several messages and depending on how they are interpreted, commu?nicate at several levels. Thus, a burglary of an old and blind woman given anumber and priority, may be viewed as a crime, seen as morally disgusting,granted a degree of occupational importance as 'good police work', and under?stood as an unfolding story (see Eco, 1979: 6).

The texts which are produced thus communicate denotatively and connotatively, at several levels of meaning, and can be seen as stories or narrativesabout social life brought to police attention. Through this transformational ac?tivity, everyday tales and troubles are returned to the speaker like an echo in

which words now are heard with new pitch, speed, frequency and volume andseemingly from a different source.Semiotics provides a vehicle for analysis of the context of communicationproduced by organizations. Using a set of calls from a British police organiza?tion, I apply semiotic analysis to identify the units within the messages, the as?sociative contexts within which they are made meaningful or signify, and the

ways in which these messages are seen as narratives.

Semiotics

The science of signs or semiotics, draws on brilliant reformulations of linguis?tics by Ferdinand Saussure (1966) and of logic by C.S. Peirce (1958). The aimof semiotics is to derive principles of signification, or explain how the meaningof objects, behaviors, or talk is produced, shared and reproduced. According



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289to Peirce (quoted in Eco, 1984: 14), a sign is 'something which stands to some?body for something' implies interpretation or an interpr?tant which connectsthe first 'something', a 'signified content' (a signifier or an expression), withthe second 'something' (a signified or content). The interpr?tant is both a signand a link between signs. This 'standing for' is a process o? signification. Sig?nification occurs when signs express meaning within dLsystem of interpretation.

A sign, as Peirce first noted, is essentially incomplete because it takes itsmean?ing within a system of relations, and patterns of opposition, similarity, anal?

ogy, or contiguity distinguish as well as connect signs. The content may linkan expression, the word 'red', with a content, 'blood' or 'stop'. The signifyingprocess is social, determined and variously conventionalized. Because signs arecreated by connections of expression and content, as well as being linked toeach other, various kinds of signification can occur in any message or set of

messages in a text.Semiotics includes pragmatics, or the search for rules-in-use governing inter?

pretation and meaning. The quest includes identifying expressions and con?tents, rules or principles which govern their connection, and implied conse?quences of such connections. These connections are in theory dynamic in sofar as signs may refer to another sign. 'Red' may denote 'blood', and 'blood'in turn may connote 'friend', 'family connections', or 'loyalty' at another lev?el. Denotations are more limited, proximal or contiguous, whilst connotationsare reflexive and similar, guided by cultural codes or principles of interpreta?tion that are wider in reference.

A code is a set of rules or principles, tacit, assumed or written, which connectexpression and content within a context. The encoding and decoding of mes?sages requires competence, which in this case is seen as organizationally de?rived, learnt and validated. The competence at issue is variable and diverse, al?

most a collection of associative possibilities or dictionaries rather than an inde?pendent set of rules or principles for interpreting messages and producing

meaning (Eco, 1984; Descombes, 1980: 92-100). The associations that obtainbetween signs are cognitively partitioned by frames which indicate the transi?tion from the everyday world to a specialized world of meaning and practice(Goffman, 1974; Uspensky, 1983). Frames indicate associative contexts. By'context' is meant aspects of knowledge that are assumed by speakers butwhich may not be expressed explicitly in the utterance (or communicational

unit). These may include expectations for actions, deictic and anaphoric refer?ences, honorifics (indices of respect), and previous knowledge about how such

messages should be processed (see Levinson, 1983: Ch. 2). The context is thetacit or unseen basis for handling or processing calls. These contexts are metacommunicational: messages about messages (see Bateson, 1972: 177-200).



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290Texts

The notion of organizational text which is critical here assumes that readersprovide an interpretative frame in their reading that draws on culturally accept?ed modes of interpretation (codes), conventions about how and what to readfrom and read into any communication or text, and connections which aredrawn between the units of the communication and an on-going sequence ofactions or functions (see Barthes, 1975, 1977; Culler, 1975). The social role ofthe reader, the associative contexts utilized to cluster and connect as well as dif?ferentiate the relevant signs within the text, the contentions about what consti?tutes a communicational unit, and the technology inwhich the message is sentand received all shape a text.

Rules about how one does this, or metacommunicative rules (Bateson, 1972:179; Eco, 1979: 154), are related to but cannot be derived from formal organi?zational procedures, organizational charts of authority, occupational cultureor the law (see Cicourel, 1984; Ericson, 1985). When messages move throughsubsystems of organization, each with ways of adding connotative or 'mytho?logical' (Baxthes, 1972) levels of meaning, they acquire an intertextuality or reflexivity in that they refer to other texts within themselves (Kristeva, 1981: 15).Message is a function of a cognitively or semantically isolated text within anorganizational field.2

Classic textual analysis derived from formalists (Propp, Shklovski, Jakobson) summarized by Todorov (1981) identifies three aspects of texts: the se?

mantic, or the meaning of texts, the mode of presentation or style of messages,and the syntactical, or the structure of texts. It is the latter that is of concernhere. Structural analysis of texts examines the functional relationships betweenunits of the text, the narrative or story, and the modes of combination of theunits (their spatial and temporal ordering). Once the units and the objects areidentified one has a unit-system of acts and consequences, the model of whichis the sentence with subject, object and verb (Fowler, 1977). The combinationsand sequences by which units are orchestrated into narrative ideally requiresthat an entire text be analyzed. However, in organizational analysis, the dic?tionary of available meanings, the formats and classification system, the re?sources of natural language (grammar and syntax), as well as roles, interpreta?tion and technology form an underlying machinery for the production of texts(see Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Knorr-Cetina, 1981). The plots, figures andspatial-temporal relations as well as the perspective or modality (the voice ofthe text - who speaks?) are organizationally constrained. Given a text, as?sumptions are made about underlying rules which may order both their pro?duction and their contents.

The analysis will identify textual units, associative contexts and the narrativetypes which emerge within one subsystem of the police organization studied.3



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Method, data and settingThe British Police Department (BPD) is a large urban constabulary employingsome 6,500 officers and 1,900 civilians, policing an urban area of some 222,400acres, with a population of 2.7 million (1980 figures). The communicationscentre, located inDivisional Headquarters, receives communications directedto the police via either the 999 emergency number, or an eight digit number.

A call can be made either to an official agency (the ambulance control, the buscontrol, the fire brigade), or to the police on a 999 line or a seven or eight digitnumber. If a call ismade on a 999 line, it is screened by operators prior to thepolice operators being informed. The ambulance control, fire brigade or buscontrol call on a direct line to the Centre to either report what has occurred orto request police assistance. Alarm calls are directly received by operators andallocated to subdivisions for response.

Operators answer these calls, give them from one to three classification num?bers and take relevant information within a format which is loosely applied inorder to elicit the location of the event called about, the caller's name andphone number, and a description of the problems used to classify it and to addremarks if necessary. These data are entered on a VDU as incidents. Incidents,if they require further attention, are relayed to subdivisions, and processed bypolice sergeants ('controllers'). Some are assigned to officers for further atten?tion. Some work arises from subdivision in the form of calls, citizens who ar?rive at the station and self-initiated work of officers. The centralized systemaccounts for notionally about sixty per cent of the workload, and does not re?cord CID work or assignments. Most traffic work results from incidents pro?cessed at the traffic control centre. The nine calls analyzed here constitute allcalls received in one hour (2258-2356 on 25 January 1980) on one subdivision('Queens' Fields') from the communications centre of the BDP (see Table l).4

AnalysisAn outline of the transformation of events into records and other organization?al products can be set out. Diverse events in the object-world produce callsabout events (many social variables such as class, education, age and culturepattern this) from variously organized sources (roughly from high to low infor?

mational neworks) which are screened by operators who convert some calls in?to messages and then into incidents requiring police attention. Incidents arethus organizationally classified communicational units, or calls about eventsconverted into messages. These incidents are then passed on by several chan?nels from operators in the Centre to subdivisional controllers. Controllers re



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292Table 1. Nine incidents and their sources received by the Queens' Field controller1. PC radios to say he is taking a prisoner to a jail on the subdivision (radio).

2. VDU message from the Centre saying a citizen/caller thinks that aMini Metro parked in frontof a house without number plates my be stolen (999 call).

3. VDU message from the Centre: a man has reported a stolen van (999 call).4. VDU message from the Centre: Bus Control rang Centre to report a fight on a bus (direct line).5. VDU message from Centre: Ambulance Control reports that a man has been taken to hospital

(direct line).6. VDU message from Centre: woman reports a disturbance outside a community centre (and her

house) (999 call).7. VDU message from Centre: man reports youth fighting outside his house (999 call).8. VDU message from Centre: woman reports attempted theft of her vehicle (phone) (7 digit

number).9. VDU message: Bus Control rang Centre to report a wounding aboard a bus (direct line).

ceive incidents from several channels (VDU, telephone, face to face, writtenmessages, telex), but primarily manage incidents via VDUs of four transactional types: information given by the caller, information received from the caller;referral (two way); and action requests. The controllers thus stand between thepublic and the operators on the one hand and the officers on the other who ac?cept assignments, take on jobs and write reports when and if they encounterthe public.

The controllers may be oriented to the noise around them, to the field of ac?tivities in the setting, or to the message itself. If they are oriented to the mes?sage, interviews suggest that they first obtain a kind of gestalt, or holistic as?sessment of 'what it means'. Any question of priority, specialized personnelneeds, and other actions follow. They constitute the text into a set of units ofinformation almost simultaneously. This logical partitioning is described else?

where (Manning, forthcoming). The discernible units or syntagms are not criti?cal to this analysis.5These syntagms are only relevant to the associative contexts in which they

appear, and one (or more) of these contexts will provide a basis for mininarratives or stories within the social world of the police. The ten items orunits, the syntagms in this police organization, can be grouped into various as?sociative contexts. These contexts, taking the message as a whole, are of twokinds. The first operates on the basis of mere proximity. Calls following eachother being seen as like each other inmany ways (time, source and channel arealways communicated) are linked into ametonomic chain. The second operatesby similarity. Calls can be grouped by content similarities within that sub?system (in this case, controllers). This is done with reference to context. Con?sider five primary contexts based on similarity used by controllers inQueens'

Fields.



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The first context includes 'action' calls which are in opposition to 'nonaction' or information-only calls. Police have discretion about how certain in?cidents will be treated, for example, road accidents, hospital/ambulance re?ports and fires, and a controller may or may not consider them to require 'ac?tion',6 and file them for information in the computer memory. A second con?text is a grouping of calls based on whether the event is on-going, in progress,or just completed (i.e. it could be said to be still in progress so far as one couldknow given currently available system information) which contrasts with fin?ished or completed events. A third context includes whether the completed orongoing incident (police activity responding to the event, on call). A fourthcontext includes contrast between crime and non-crime calls. The latter is fur?ther sub-divided on the basis of the thirty categories used in the BPD. A fifthcontext is an expansion of the third context. There are two subcontexts speci?fying completed incidents: reconstruct and result. When an incident is reportedto be completed the controller must reconstruct what was said about what hap?pened - certain required (having been reported to him, a characteristic of anincident to be closed) - and enter a result using the thirty category BPD classi?fication system (one or more may already have been assigned by the operator).

There are three subcontexts for on-going incidents (Elaborated elsewhere,Manning, forthcoming). If an incident is on-going as described in contextthree, then more mental work is required in that he must reconstruct the event(seeing it perhaps as having imminent features), predict what police action willbe seen to be needed, and speculate about a result that might be forthcoming,sought or potential. The controller seeks to produce a plausible interpretationof the meaning of the incident, given a knowledge of the results expected andthe tacit knowledge he may possess about how types of assignments and jobsare produced from incidents there are three subcontexts for on-going incidents.

In summary, the signs (or expressions), e.g. 'stolen van' listed in the nine in?cidents (Table 1), are incomplete or have no use-value until linked in onefashion or another. They became functionally meaningful when an associativecontext (e.g. action versus non-action) is discerned cognitively by controllers.That is, all messages are cognitively partitioned from non-messages, and ar?rayed in some orderly fashion, but the five associative contexts are not transi?tively restraining i.e. one must not follow the previous context and must pre?cede the following context for sorting out calls. Although they do not unfoldin an algorithm, the messages, once they are arrayed horizontally into distinc?tive numbered and classified incidents, tend to be seen in the associative con?texts listed until all options are exhausted. So although each context containsoppositions within it (a linking of cognitive domains organized around shareddenotative meanings) linking them metaphorically or connotatively, the con?texts themselves contrast with each other metaphorically. They act as a series



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294of sequentially relevant filters upon action, but not all are equally relevant forany sets of calls processed.

A text is formed by contexts which connect expression and content each ofwhich produces a changing level or kind of signification; an example may beuseful at this point. At the denotative level, expressions such as 'burglary' or'possible abandoned car' have denotative references to the scheme of the BPD;

at a connotative level, they may be also linked in a context (crime non-crime)to produce a new text to be read as a whole as 'hurry' or 'no hurry'. The com?bination of denotative and connotative meaning produces amulti-message textwithin this subsystem (see Manning in Denzin, 1985). This analysis has ap?proached the structural semantics of messages, while the aim of the followingsection is to outline the narrative or syntactical structure of messages in thecontroller subsystem.

Mini-narratives

These incidents, or transformed calls as messages, possess an apparent struc?ture, order and coherence. They are as itwere, 'mini-narratives' or stories. Tostate that an incident is a collapsed narrative or mini-narrative is to assume theoperations underlying them and to gloss them as well for the purposes of anal?ysis. The narrative structure thus contains within it a host of richly contextualized meanings, imputed understandings and expectations of reactions whichare used to make sensible the incidents as read. The context of 'on-going inci?dent', however, forms them as stories of a particular type, providing an unfold?ing line of action, a set of characters and plot, central peripheral actions, andoutcomes.7 These stories can be rendered or reordered to produce simpler andyet more abstract relational patterns (see Propp, 1958; and Rumelhart, 1975).In the analysis that follows it is shown that incident stories possess a narra?tive structure based upon the actions of the central figures as seen from the mo?dality or voice of the police or the third party. There is a protagonist, mutuallyaffecting actions and conditions upon that action. The unit of analysis is theincident. The event or the central crucible transforms the hero and the othersthrough interaction, whilst the police play something of an unfinished metahero role. Using the material inTable 1,we can attempt to further reduce somefeatures of these stories.

Preliminarily, we map the nine calls used as exemplars of the approach intoa grid of types of incidents which are in turn transformed events (reported bycitizens or officials to police operators who then send them on). The callers'role may be indexed by a mere voice on an automatic alarm or the call of anofficial of a company. These represent surrogate victims. An individual victim



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295Table 2. Incident types arrayed by event, actors, targets, and call source as seen by controllers

Incident type Actor in the event Target in the event Call source1

23456789

101112

++++++

++00

0+

0+

+ = Victim (personor organization)- = Observer

+ = Person- = Property0 = Social order

+ = Official- = Citizen

or an observer of someone else's plight may call. These can be coded as victim(person or organization) or observer as shown inTable 2. The target of the ac?tion reported in the incident about the event can be either a person, social or?der, or property. The source of the call can be either an official or a citizen.These three axes when combined describe types of incidents or associative con?texts for assembling texts. The axes are the principal causal concerns of thecontroller.

Each of the calls/incidents can be thus typed using the pattern of present orabsent attributes given the information known and its construction by the con?troller. These types are shown in Table 2. Further subtypes could be producedif a larger number of calls were to be analyzed. These incidents demonstratea specialized body of knowledge and interpretation of human behaviour. Theycontain a set of figures, motives, expected outcomes and moral implications.

Table 3 shows aspects of the cognitive substructuring of common-sense po?lice knowledge in regard to these types of calls on this subdivision. Itmight benoted that like the idea of 'text' or 'syntagm' what is believed to be knownabout such events in the object-world is always surrounded by a set of under?stood but not stated premises. Barthes (1977) terms these 'indices', or charac?teristics assumed or repressed, not a part of the encoding of the text. The roleof elevating of these meanings while suppressing others is played by organiza?tional coding and interpretation.

Each of these types is a summated story. It captures the subject of the event,the object of the event, the observer (victim), the villain, their implicit action



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Table 3. Police stories as narratives*

Type 5: Property event/reaction/police called (call #2, 3, 8)

Villain -?Stolen Buscontrol

D

Calls

E Police

Type 11 :Order event/observer initiated/police called (calls # 6, 7)

Police* Types are taken from Table 2.

quences (observed car was missing, checked memory for where last parked,rang police, requested they came) and the implicit hero or metahero (the po?lice). Type five (+-) victim of property offence (stolen car) rings police,type eight (- + + ) observer of personal offence rings bus control, bus controlrings police and type ten (- 0 - ) observer of order event (or possible personaloffence) rings police (Table 3) illustrate the narrative expansion of Table 2 andthe calls in Table 1.

These narrative substructures are very crude extractions from a large set ofinfluences. Analysis of additional calls might produce a set of subtypes of vil?lain, for example, or callers by motive or more complex action sequences. Butit is likely that screening at this point is quite general and gross, and such nuan?ces are merely incidental to the work rather than essential.



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297All the calls are mapped from the police perspective or modality; it can be

assumed that citizens may view the syntactical structure of events rather differ?ently. The combinations suggested in this preliminary analysis such as the rela?tions between hero, villain(s), metahero, target and subject within a policestory with an on-going plot, story line, climax and resolution requires a much

more detailed analysis with additional data as well as an expanded conceptualframework to illustrate it properly (see Scholes and Kellogg, 1966).

Itwould appear that the sequence of events discussed in this paper is a partialrendition of stages one, two and three in an expanded narrative. For example,a sequence of the following kind might be imagined:

1. Preliminaries 2. Crime 3. Event(argument, event reported toplan, fight, car (various sorts) officials,

stolen) police, etc.

4. Investigation(uniformedbranch,branch, CID,specialistsquad(s))

Resolution(closed investi?gation, court,clearance ofcrime etc.)

Not all empirical events will progress through all the stages listed, the ordermay follow this precisely, and some of the stages may overlap each other. This

is the bare outlines of a formal model of the resolution of a police story. Eventhe absence of a stage is of course significant, and truncated stories, collapsedsequences and 'failed' or incomplete stories may have importance for elaborat?ing the model and explicating the possible connection between narrative struc?ture, catharsis and shaping the experience of everyday life.8

The analysis of texts which draws on narrative structure of police stories alsodraws upon general knowledge of plays, television, novels, fairy tales and tra?ditional folk tales. Police stories are a particular copy of everyday life; anycopy risks being bogus, false, deceptive and intrusive in social reality that is notso marked and framed. In one sense police stories represent a reversal of na?ture, or of narratives of everyday life; they are rather a copy of nature in thiscase defined as culture. Thus, the modelling of everyday life in the text of apolice incident and of police narratives should be examined not for veracity orirony, but rather as a specially framed bit of culture (see Barley, 1983).



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CommentThe question to which this paper has been addressed is the nature of constrainton communication exercised by the organizational contexts of messageprocessing. Context is, if nothing else, assumed knowledge; it is what is absentfrom speech but signalled by it. Garfinkel (1967), following Schutz (1964) hassuggested that this is everyday knowledge - matters taken for granted. Thisnotion must be paired with assumptions about the social distribution of knowl?edge, and the bounded nature of the social reality within which knowledge isassumed and used. The nature of the transition from one sort of social realitysuch as the citizens' world to another, the police world, is epistemologicallycritical. 'Inmany instances, it seems psychologically necessary tomark out theboundaries between the world of everyday experience and a world which hasspecial semantic significance' (Uspensky, 1983: 140). What is explored here ishow the framing of a semantic and syntactically specialized world is accom?plished on the surface and at the level of narrative structure.

Studies of natural language which intend to illuminate the concept of contextdiffer from studies in amore formalistic or semiotic mode such as that present?ed here. Conversational analysis has preferred bits of conversations, phrasesor brief sentence sequences, often taped and transcribed from telephone ex?changes. Since by and large conversational analysis is done from transcribedspeech, the problem of interest here is not addressed: the encodation of naturalspeech into institutional formats, records, and classification systems. In asense, this analysis is one of translation and transformation of natural speechinto organizational or institutional talk. It is limited in so far as the first trans?formations of callers' talk into an incident, accomplished by operators, is priorto the controllers' transformation of the incident into an assignment or task.

These data reveal second order transformations of natural speech. The firsttransformation is from a call to an incident and the second, accomplished bythe controllers, is from an incident into an assignment or task for officers onthe ground.

Textual analysis is limited by a number of its features. It is guided by amodelof language and of the formal syntactical features of narrative forms. It drawsheavily on written (or transcribed oral) texts of traditional forms of narrativesuch as fairy tales, classical or traditional literature (the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Balzac are favoured) or myths.

These texts are analyzed in units and assembled not only as narratives butin terms of the symbolic oppositions and associations (compare L?vi-Strauss,1963, with Barthes, 1977 and Derrida, 1976). The connections between surface

and deep structure(s) are rather obscure. Organizationally produced texts areconstrained in respect to the natural units of analysis (communicational units



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within the police communicative system), the level of the discourse (it does notexceed a message or series of messages), the range of narrative forms withinwhich messages may be cast, and the feedback and negative learning which oc?curs in transactions. These contrast with the static written form of literarytexts.

The marking and framing of texts within organizations requires a conceptof non-text and that which specifically functions tomark the text from the non?text in operational and cognitive terms within the organization studied. A textis a semantic organization of signs (Uspensky, 1983: 5), but it is also physicallyframed by the technology by which it is sent, the classification system used toclassify it, and the assigned roles and ranks of organization members who onlysee and process a communicational unit in a particular physical location witha particular social definition of setting-specific duties.

That which is not text which is named is organization. Of particular interest,in addition to the processes named immediately above, are the two modes of

organizing groups of texts, by metonomy or proximity (roughly order of ap?pearance), or by metaphor (Manning, 1979; Morgan, 1980), These are twomodes of cognitively differentiating texts and groups of texts. The constant sta?bilization of such texts, the notion that the 'message' in common-sense termsremains the same as it passes through the organization, ismaintained in partby the structure of authority within the organization and in part by repetitionand enunciation (Manning, 1985, forthcoming). The iterative processes whichembed the communicational unit remain: technology, classification, roles andtasks and the interpretative practices within the organization. They produce or?der, redundancy, and stability in texts and are in contrast to non-textual ele?

ments suppressed in the organization. These non-textual and non-authoritativeforces are those of diversity, play, spontaneity, innovation, and uncertainty(see Cooper, 1983, 1985). The text can be viewed in yet another fashion as rep?resenting both organization, or the internal perspective, and the environmentor the external perspective. A text of a citizens' call contains a double referentin that it refers to itself whilst moving through the police communicationalsystem and to the environment of citizens' calls from which it came. Similarly,context produces binding and lasting conventional meanings within organiza?tions at the same time that it is the basis for a socially based generative seman?tics.

Notes

1. Some initial lines of exploration have been charted by Cicourel (1968, 1975, 1976, 1984); Eglinand Wideman (1986), Atkinson and Drew (1979) and Heritage (forthcoming).



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3002. The term 'field' refers to the social activities taking place within the ecological-spatial domain

of the organization, whether under the cognitive control of the label 'work' or not. It has a gen?eral resemblance to Barker's term, a standing pattern of behaviour or a setting, and ismeantto contrast with the specific cognitive activities designated as the message. Also omitted from

message is noise, the social and/or technological unwanted communication that may also sur?round a message. From an operational point of view, operators, controllers and officers mustdelineate message from field and from noise, and since these are background/foreground mat?ters, they shift in salience given other matters such as the other events impinging on police worke.g. workload, political events, untoward events or unexpected scale or importance and the like(compare Klapp, 1978; see Manning, forthcoming, for a more detailed discussion of these con?cepts and their relevance to police communication systems).

3. For these purposes, the procedures by which such a structure is produced and maintained cognitively is set aside or bracketed (see Cicourel, 1972, 1975, 1976, 1984). Cicourel describes the

ways in which ideas from talk, whether mediated or not by technological devices, are mappedupon formats of various types, showing it requires a number of assumptions about long andshort term memory, the chunking and coding of bits of information, selective attention to mat?ters of prosodie variation amongst speakers, and the construction of a deictic and anaphoricreferences. The structure shown here is an implicit ordering of these units; the process by whichthe dictionary (or code), the coder and the encoded (messages as a part of a formative text) arearticulated and is not here described (see Manning, forthcoming: Ch. 8).

4. The focus of this analysis is controllers' work for incidents received at this subdivision. Trafficand alarm calls are screened out at the Centre (although traffic calls could arise from calls re?ceived on the subdivisional number).

5. These syntagms are:1. Time (before/after an event).

2. Source (public/organizational/police) of the original call.3. Channel radio (radio/VDU/telephone/in person).4. Location of the event (address/place/site).5. Caller's name (or collar number of PC calling).6. Caller's location (address/place/site/call box).7. Persons acting (one/few/many) in the event.8. Actions of persons in the event.9. Direction of action (target) in the event.10. Descriptive term for the action(s) (in #8).

6. The concept of 'action' here refers to whether the controller is required to do something otherthan accept and file the incident, even though a decision not to send an officer to the hospital,or to the scene of a fire or road accident is an action of sorts.

7. Assertions made by advocates or functionalist and cognitive theories about the necessary co?herence of tales are not required to make sense of these materials (cf. Bennett and Feldman,1981). Nor are there good reasons to see these as more 'overcoded' (Eco, 1976: 133-135) than

other calls; they are not mythological renditions of everyday work.8. Perhaps the absence of satisfaction of victims of crime may be related to a lack of fit between

their cognitive model of the narrative structure of a police story and their natural experiencesin the event (cf. L?vi-Strauss, 1963: Ch. 9).



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