Signwork

Abstract

Research literature contains a number of definitions of organizations. Organizations are defined here as communication processing systems which transform diverse information into culturally patterned and constrained messages. Organizations encode and decode messages and thus create social realities. The paper investigates the utility of semiotics, the science of signs, to uncover the precise modalities of symbolic communication characteristics of complex organizations that produce enstructured and bounded systems of meaning. Semiotics argues tht signs convert sound and image into communication; insofar as organizations do much the same, they produce sign work. The paper investigates a police communications system (PCS) in a very large British urban constabulary by means of ethnographic field work: observation, written records, and tapes of calls to the police. Message form and content (syntagms and paradigms) are described, the application of these paradigms or associative contexts is shown in one segment of the PCS, and the process of interpretation of meaning over time, or semiosis, is detailed. The relationship between generative meaning within the organization over time and police practice is discussed. In the conclusion, some limitations upon the semiotic-message-processing view of organizations are outlined. It is concluded that the coding of a communicational unit is socially contextual as well as physically and temporally situated. It manifests conventionalized and stabilized sign functions. The institutional codes which serve this stabilization function are displayed in practice, thus fieldwork and observation must be combined with formal modes of analysis.