Peter K. Manning

Brian Forst

In this critique of privatization, Manning focuses on issues of free market theory and management practices such as total quality management that he believes are harmful to the traditional police mandate to control crime. He questions the appropriateness of strategies that emphasize service to consumers. For Forst, the free market paradigm and economic incentives do not carry the same stigma. He argues that neither public nor private policing should have a monopoly on law enforcement activities, and he predicts an even more varied mix of public and private police activities than are currently available. Following the two main sections of the book, each author assesses the other's contribution, reflecting on not just their points of departure but also on the areas in which they agree.

Two Views

The Privatization of Policing

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.Peter K. Manning is a Professor of Psychiatry and of Sociology at Michigan State University and a member of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford. "Symbolic Communication "brings to fruition themes and 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.

Signifying Calls and the Police Response

Symbolic Communication

This book discusses the semiotic and ethnographic bases for organizational analysis, including the related fieldwork issues confronting the investigator. It explains the importance of rhetorical-dramaturgic and phenomenological strategies for the study of organizations. The arbitrary and culturally based connections in which organizations abound require an understanding of the particulars of cultural scenes, first observed, later conceptualized through semiotic theory. Organizational Communication includes a series of examples from applied semiotics research in nuclear regulatory policy making, truth telling, regulatory control (by, among others, the police), and risk analysis. These data provide the basis for a critique of the limits of earlier analyses of organizational change, such as those offered by structuralist theories. Dr. Manning concludes with an assessment of the postmodernist ethnographic strategies that have evolved as a response to a larger representational crisis, and of the implications of these strategies for the study of organizational culture.

Organizational Communication

With the rise of surveillance technology in the last decade, police departments now have an array of sophisticated tools for tracking, monitoring, even predicting crime patterns. In particular crime mapping, a technique used by the police to monitor crime by the neighborhoods in their geographic regions, has become a regular and relied-upon feature of policing. Many claim that these technological developments played a role in the crime drop of the 1990s, and yet no study of these techniques and their relationship to everyday police work has been made available. Noted scholar Peter K. Manning spent six years observing three American police departments and two British constabularies in order to determine what effects these kinds of analytic tools have had on modern police management and practices. While modern technology allows the police to combat crime in sophisticated, detail-oriented ways, Manning discovers that police strategies and tactics have not been altogether transformed as perhaps would be expected. In The Technology of Policing, Manning untangles the varying kinds of complex crime-control rhetoric that underlie much of today’s police department discussion and management, and provides valuable insight into which are the most effective—and which may be harmful—in successfully tracking criminal behavior. The Technology of Policing offers a new understanding of the changing world of police departments and information technology’s significant and undeniable influence on crime management.

Peter K. Manning

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