TECHNOLOGICAL DRAMAS AND THE POLICE: STATEMENT AND COUNTERSTATEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS*

Information technologies, especially computer-based recordkeeping and dispatching, when introduced into the police organization, are a material resource and a symbolic statement. Such statements can produce counter-statements, thus animating a dialectic, a technological drama that alters social fields (Bourdieu, 1977) and centrally features power and control (Burke, 1968). Ethnographic evidence is used to explore, with examples, four symbolic aspects (or meanings) of information technology. It is suggested that the introduction of information technology is an occasion for a socio-technical drama, or the selective use of messages to convey an impression. The drama is context dependent and plays itself out differentially in the several vertically ordered segments of police organizations. Technology as a symbol can point to one of several referents, each with overt and covert meanings: the regulatory aspects of technology, the modes of adjustment it creates, the reconstitution of technology, and processes of social reintegration. The four are ambivalent clusters that signal positive and negative meanings of “technology” while concealing relevant dissimilarities. These dramas are illustrated and analyzed, and suggestions are made for needed research. Some speculations about the consequences of technological dramas for role change in policing and the place of uncertainty in power relations conclude the paper.