Executive Memorandum

Executive Memorandum
Data Center Program Management – Financial Review and Projection

The Case Scenario:

You have recently been hired by the CIO of Xcon Xtreme Logistics, Inc. (2XL) as of January 1, 2013 to take over the management of their in-house Data Center Operation (DCO), which is responsible for hosting and maintaining the company’s wide-area network backbone, intranet, extranet, ERP system, and related centralized information system infrastructure and support. The company, 2XL, is a prominent systems integrator that provides project management services under contract to government and commercial clients worldwide, designing and developing custom systems solutions.

The DCO supports 2XL’s 7 global branch offices and numerous floating satellite and field locations where company personnel are stationed on-site at customer locations conducting various stages of project performance. During the middle part of 2011, almost all of the equipment within the data center was replaced or upgraded, including new operating software. The new infrastructure was selected to provide increased data storage capacity and faster response to meet the burgeoning needs of the organization, while also affording greener operation through enhanced energy efficiency.

The present configuration of DCO employs approximately 16 FTE operational personnel, who monitor system performance and staff the tech support line for company users—internal customers—from all over the world. Additionally, there are 4 technical personnel who perform routine preventive and corrective maintenance on the system, troubleshoot system malfunctions, code and install software patches and maintain licensing versions and customizations in concert with vendors and subcontractors. These staffers do not have responsibility for LANs and client workstations outside of the DCO you have now been hired to manage; there is a separate company division for IT support to users operating their own hardware. The company Web site is resident on DCO hardware at your facility, but the Web content is managed and maintained by Marketing & Communications.

You have been given a financial report in Excel that shows the aggregated quarterly expenses for the DCO as of the end of 2nd Quarter 2013 (6/30/12), and dating back three years. This is the most recent accounting data available, and 2010 was the first year that the DCO was centralized. The accounting office has coded the operational staff labor expenses as Cost Account OPLAB, and the technical staff labor expenses as Cost Account TCLAB. Some computer hardware is acquired on capitalized leases and some is purchased outright and depreciated on a declining schedule, and both of these sources of amortized fixed cost are reported as Cost Account EQDEP. Expenses for parts, supplies, software license fees, outside vendor support for installations and maintenance beyond the in-house capability, and other direct variable costs of maintaining the operations are reported as Cost Account EQMNT.?

refer to the accompanying file, Computer Lab C1 – Available Accounting Report.xls for this report. The clerk from the Accounting Department produced it following the same model that your predecessor DCO manager had set up many years ago, which may not be entirely useful for your needs. You are stunned to learn that the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) is so mistrusting of the veracity of ERP data, that all official accounting data are re-entered and maintained on an independent, secure LAN in the Accounting Department, to which you have no direct access. But you do not have the time or luxury at this moment to send the report back and ask for more accounting support, or wait for the insufferably slow accounting processes to yield the 3rd and 4th Qtr data you would rather have. And rectifying the ERP situation with the CFO will be a longer-term goal—one that is entirely unapproachable for you as just a new manager under the CIO (Chief Information Officer; your new boss)—so you will make use of the accounting report as presented, to take initial stock of what you have inherited.

Purpose of this exercise:

In this lab exercise, students will be introduced to Excel’s powerful Pivot Tables, and the forecasting function. Students will also learn about and demonstrate charting through the use of Excel’s Pivot Chart functionality. Students will demonstrate how well-designed tables and charts can be used to clearly communicate information/data and trends and insights for managerial analysis and decision-making. Students will also demonstrate their ability to manipulate or ‘spin’ data in pivot tables to provide key forecasting insights.

Moreover, students will make use of partial data on Quality Assurance (QA) performance metrics, and “play detective” developing a spreadsheet to help deduce some practical and actionable significance from the expense information pertaining to a sampling of knowledge worker job functions. The efficiency of a business operation is suggested by cost analysis of expense data, but the effectiveness is determined by performance metrics. Both the expense data and the performance data are obtained through some form of monitoring. A manager must know how to integrate financial and QA inputs to permit meaningful evaluation of the efficacy of a business operation. The knowledge gained by this analytical process provides the basis for the manager to decide on what course of action might be necessary to try to bring the business operation back under control.

 

1) Selectively copy blocks of salient data and paste them several rows below your Pivot Table.
a. Based on the Case Scenario, salient suggests cost figures beginning in 2010 Q4, after all of the new installations and expansion hires were in place (2010 Q2 & Q3 were the periods of transition).
b. Select only quarterly cost figures and paste them in adjacent columns to drop out columns of totals.
c. Include the blank future quarters in your pasted-up salient data table, and the 2012 Total column.
2) Copy or enter the Cost Account labels to the beginning of each row in your pasted-up salient data table.
3) Create a header row above the salient data columns changing 2010 Q4 to simply “1”, 2011 Q1 to “2” and so forth, thru “9” for 2012 Q4 (these headers become your “known x’s” in the forecast function).
4) Enter a forecast function statement into each of the 2012 Q3 cells (which should now be column “8” of your salient data), following the formula syntax as prompted in Excel.
a. If you enter a dollar sign in front of each row number within the formula for the cells containing the x and known_x data, you can copy the formula to successive rows without incrementing the stationary row referencing x (e.g., the sequence M$15,F24:L24,F$15:L$15 copied one cell below yields M$15,F25:L25,F$15:L$15)
5) Enter a forecast function statement into each of the 2012 Q4 cells, being mindful to adjust the range of known y’s and known x’s to span data columns 1 thru 8! (This makes the 2012 Q4 forecast a function of the trend forecast for 2012 Q3.)
6) Correct the formulas in the Totals row and Totals column to cover the 2012 data only (including the forecasted quarters), and use the following template as a guide for dressing up the resultant Forecast Table into a professional graphical object for to include later in your Executive Memorandum.
a. Some check figures are included to verify your progress at this point.
b. Please be mindful of the color scheme; the line placement, thickness and style; the font size and positioning, etc. A competent and persuasive report will exhibit crisp visual aesthetics in addition to precise and concise data/information content!

You are also being evaluated on how well you follow directions and how well you can duplicate the cosmetic features demonstrated in this lab exercise. Packaging is every bit as important to professional credibility as content. Your reports must be both correct and attractive!

7) NOTE: When you paste a selected block from Excel into Word, if you use the Paste Special feature, and specify bitmap, it creates a graphic object that is defined by pixels rather than an interactive or linked spreadsheet. This can be beneficial to the extent that subsequent readers or editors of the Word document can’t accidentally (or intentionally!) alter your numbers or the visual aesthetics of your embedded table (a recommended security for a final report!). Draft reports, especially if they are subject to review and adjustment by other contributors might be better served by making an ordinary paste, which leaves the embedded spreadsheet block interactive (although this Microsoft feature often performs less than admirably, especially with regard to visual aesthetics!).

Steps for creating Pivot Chart, and visually enhancing the chart attributes:

1) Highlight the entirety of your Pivot Table—the one you pasted starting in cell F5.
2) Create a Line chart by clicking on the Chart Wizard tool, which will open a chart from the selected data. You may need to click the Chart Wizard tool icon a second time to open up the Chart Options popup, where you can select Line format. The basic line chart sub-type (with no markers) is appropriate to display trends over time and categories.
3) Work through the tabs in the Chart Options pop-up to make the correct adjustments to your line chart.
a. Make the Chart title, “DCO Costs 2009 – Present (with forecast thru 2012)”.
b. Make the Category (X) axis, “Fiscal Period”.
c. Make the Value (Y) axis, “Expenses (US Dollars)”.
4) Place the chart as a new sheet named “Pivot Chart”. Move the Pivot Chart tab to the right of the Pivot Table tab.
a. You may need to reposition the gray data field markers to make the chart make sense by matching the labels you typed in during step 3, above. Time advances left to right in the X-axis, expenses increase in the Y-axis, and the legend shows one colored line for each of four cost accounts.
b. You may choose to make additional enhancements for visual aesthetics, but first you must complete the linkages for the forecast data. (Otherwise, after you make the final changes to the Pivot Table data, visual enhancements to the chart will likely be reset to default conditions.)
5) To update the forecast data to the Pivot Table, you must return to the source data you pasted to the Pivot Data worksheet. In each empty cell in the records you appended to the bottom of this source list (cells D485 thru D492), enter a link to the corresponding cell you created in the Forecast Table in the upper right-hand area on this same worksheet.
a. Be careful to match the correct Cost Accounts and fiscal quarters! The rows in the Pivot Data are alphabetized, whereas you might not have alphabetized the blank addendum records, and the fiscal quarters are in different columns in the Pivot Data, hence also in the Forecast Table, but not so in the source data.
6) After all 8 cells are filled with their corresponding dollar figures, click the Refresh Data function on the Pivot Table toolbar. You should see now that the data lines on your pivot chart extend the rest of the way into Fiscal Period 2012 Q4.
7) Now is the time to visually verify the shape of the data lines against the business case, as reflected in the visual patterns of the numeric data (to make sure you haven’t made a glaring error!), and visually enhance the chart for aesthetics.
a. If you see a dramatic fluctuation in any data lines during your forecast period (last two quarters of 2012), it may mean that you have cross-linked the data incorrectly in steps 5 and 5a, above. Watch those Cost Account labels and match them accordingly!
b. To enhance appearances for example, double-click on one of the colored data lines, and select Line Weight to make it thicker.
c. Make the line weights all match, and make any other aesthetic changes to your liking (change color scheme, font size and placement of labels, etc.). This graphic will become an attachment to your Executive Memorandum, so make it gorgeous and professional!

Steps for developing a deductive Performance Evaluation:

1) As the new DCO Manager you are trying to organize your office and settle in while also urgently preparing the foregoing financial analysis in preparation of the Executive Memorandum the CIO is expecting from you.
a. While shuffling the stuff around on your inherited desk, you discover that your predecessor, the former manager of the DCO, left a copy of the following report, complete with legibly handwritten annotations (report appears at page 8).
b. After you finish producing your Pivot Table and Pivot Chart, you get to wondering about the notes that your predecessor had written, and studying the expense trends calculated in your own analysis, and it occurs to you that you need to explore deeper meaning in these facts and figures before submitting your first official memo to the boss. You want to make sure that you optimally sharpen the analysis, conclusions, and recommendations in the memo.
c. On your inherited desktop computer, you do a search in Windows on the title of this new-found document, Performance History Report, and the Explorer returns one Excel file by that name. The file contains one worksheet tabbed “QA Report”, which indeed matches the document you discovered. You are very relieved that you will not need to re-key the information into a new spreadsheet!
2) Starting with the source file Computer Lab C1 – Performance History Report.xls, copy the QA Report worksheet into the Excel file you have been using to produce the Pivot Table and Pivot Chart. Rename this fourth tab “Performance Evaluation” and move it to the right of the Pivot Chart tab.

 

3) Study the seven columns of data, carefully reading the column headers to fathom their meanings. Scan down each column, looking for conspicuous patterns in the figures. Your managerial ambition is to draw out the potential of embedded information—and hence tacit knowledge—that can be derived from the prudent analytical processing and savvy managerial interpretation of mundane data in this lifelike business scenario.
4) You recognize the name Naomi on the annotated document, and realize that she is one of the lead technical staffers who still works at and now reports to you here at the DCO. You invite her in to your office to discuss this data analysis.
5) Naomi explains that she had been compiling this data for the former manager all along, and has given lots of thought to its analysis, especially since the former manager left on such short notice as “things seemed to be getting worse.”
a. She says you could also run forecast functions for each column to predict the trends for Q3 and Q4 of 2012 and fill in the bottom three rows, but as DCO Manager you can see at a glance how every indicator reached its best level at around Q3 of 2011, and has been worsening since. A forecast would not be as meaningful as the reasons behind the trend, which will require managerial intervention: evaluation and control. So you correctly choose not to bother with any forecasting in this part of the analysis.
b. You should be impressed with Naomi’s analytical skills, as she explains the logic for each additional column calculation as follows:
6) If we consider each complaint for an unanswered call (column H) to count as one call and add this to the calls received (column C), we get a better feel for the total demand. Some of these callers are repeat complainers, but the DCO’s job is to address and remedy every call and complaint, so each call received or complaint about an unanswered call counts as one caller toward our workload.
a. Create a header in cell J4 that reads “Total calls attempted: Adjusted Total Demand”. If necessary, copy the format from the adjacent cell I4.
b. Insert the formula =C5+H5 into cell J5. Copy this down to J24, and then delete the contents of the blank rows at J10, J16, and J22.
c. Color the text in column J blue, to make it visually stand apart from the source data.
7) Now we can simply divide the number of complaints for unanswered calls (column H) by the adjusted call demand (column J) to derive a complaint rate—essentially a measure of DCO’s unresponsiveness, or the percentage of customer requests that just get ignored.
a. Create a header in cell K4 that reads “% of calls not answered”. If necessary, copy the format from an adjacent cell.
b. Insert the formula =H5/J5 into cell K5. Copy this down to K24, and then delete the contents of the blank rows at K10, K16, and K22.
c. Correct the format of the data cells to number, percentage, 1 decimal point.
d. Color the text in column K blue, also to make it visually stand apart from the source data, and match the other imputed (calculated) analysis in column J.
e. You and Naomi note that this imputed customer complaint rate was atrocious and worsening gravely on the eve of and during the 2010 upgrade, but afterward was enormously alleviated (probably as the staff got more familiar and competent with all the new capabilities).
8) We can approximate the number of successful service call resolutions (satisfied customers) by taking the number of calls answered (column C) minus the number of issues still unresolved (column G), minus the number of complaints against issues that we claimed were resolved (column I).
a. Create a header in cell L4 that reads “Total resolved service calls”. If necessary, copy the format from an adjacent cell.
b. Insert the formula =C5-G5-I5 into cell L5. Copy this down to L24, and then delete the contents of the blank rows at L10, L16, and L22.
c. Again, color the text in column L blue.
9) By dividing the number of complaints against issues (column I) by this adjusted number of resolved issues (column L), we can get another critical complaint rate—essentially a measure of DCO’s incompetence, or the percentage of customer requests that we attempt to resolve but bungle.
a. Create a header in cell M4 that reads “% complaints against resolutions”. If necessary, copy the format from an adjacent cell.
b. Insert the formula =I5/(C5-G5-I5) into cell M5. Copy this down to M24, and then delete the contents of the blank rows at M10, M16, and M22.
c. Correct the format of the data cells to number, percentage, 1 decimal point.
d. Color the text in column M blue.
e. You and Naomi also note that this complaint rate similarly worsened more and more until the switchover, then improved dramatically—but has been starting to creep up again ever since!
10) If we copy the bottom row from our Pivot Table and do a paste special, to lock down the values and transpose the figures to the column, we can insert a nice set of corresponding operating costs for each quarter (and annual subtotal!). This operation is a little tricky. The bold terms paste special, values, and transpose are all command selections in Excel that start with a right-click of the mouse.
a. Create a header in cell N4 that reads “Total Operating Costs (from Pivot Table data)”. If necessary, copy the format from an adjacent cell.
b. Click to the worksheet tabbed “Pivot Data” to highlight and capture the Grand Total row of the Pivot Table, G12 thru W12.
c. Click back to the Performance Evaluation worksheet, and click on cell N5.
d. Right click the command paste special, and select the options values and transpose to lock down the data as numbers (and not as formulas attached to the other worksheet!) and to stack the values into column N.
e. You will need to selectively cut and paste increments of this column of dollar figures to make each year’s worth of data align in the correct block of rows by fiscal quarter, with a space between each annual total matching the blank rows 10, 16, and 22.
f. Correct the format of the data cells to currency, 0 decimal points.
g. Color the text in column N blue.
11) In the end, we can divide the total operating cost for each period (column N) by the number of resolved calls (column L) to calculate another salient and critical ratio, perhaps the most meaningful evaluation of all: the cost per resolved call—essentially a measure of DCO’s operating efficacy—where the number of calls answered reflects efficiency, and the number of issues resolved reflects effectiveness, the combined delivery of which represents a cost per unit of technical performance.
a. Create a header in cell O4 that reads “Cost per Resolved Issue”. If necessary, copy the format from an adjacent cell.
b. Insert the formula =N5/L5 into cell O5. Copy this down to O24, and then delete the contents of the blank rows at O10, O16, and O22.
c. Correct the format of the data cells to currency, 0 decimal points.
d. Color the text in column O blue.
e. Now you and Naomi can note that these imputed figures show the cost per unit of technical performance, which is the reciprocal or inverse of the technology management definition of value, or efficacy, which are the same as technical performance per unit cost (TP/$). This means that the higher the figure in column O, the more each deliverable unit of work is costing; or, the lower the figure, the greater the performance efficacy of the DCO.
f. Note as well how this ratio has also been creeping up in the past year, following the same trend conspicuous across the board.
12) To complete the spreadsheet, simply draw in the border lines under the column headers in row 4, and above each annual total figure in rows 9, 15, and 21.
a. This level of cosmetic enhancement is only for your own visual tracking purposes, as you do not want to advertise this awkward data table to your CIO, and will not be copying and pasting any snippets of it to your Executive Memorandum!
b. Some check figures are included at page 12 to help verify your progress at this point.
13) Meanwhile, you will want to further your analysis to contemplate the root causes of the ill trends, and concisely offer these assessments and your proposed remedies in the narrative you write for your Executive Memorandum. You need to incisively address these issues in your memo to the CIO, offering a brief evaluation, with both proposed remedy and rationale. Consider these points:
a. Is the worsening trend because of the new system already getting overloaded, or has the new and improved competence become humdrum and the staff is losing enthusiasm for improvement, becoming complacent, or even cutting corners?
b. Even with Naomi’s analytical help, the figures can only point to the problem, not its underlying causes. Other, more refined metrics will be necessary to drill down into the causes. Or, to interview with Naomi and several of her coworkers to consult their subjective opinions about cultural and environmental causes behind the trouble could be very revealing.

Check figures for worksheet (d) of Deliverable file 1:

 
c. Several possibilities come to mind:
i. Are operators intentionally disconnecting or shortchanging incoming requests, to artificially boost their apparent productivity? There is a hint to this in the sustained fastest resolution time (column E) of 0.01 hours (only 36 seconds!?). It would be prudent to listen in on random calls, or appoint one lead operator per shift whose responsibility would be to monitor all other operators randomly and undetectably for quality assurance. (You have no doubt in your real life been told by many an operator or voice response system that your call is monitored or recorded for such a purpose.)
ii. The average resolution time is creeping up too, which greatly impacts efficacy. Are the operators taking a break during service calls instead of at schedule intervals, increasing their personal slack (also termed free-ridership or social-loafing)? There are numerous ways to monitor this likely behavior.
iii. It is also possible and advisable to set up incentives to inspire greater productivity and performance improvements rather than to just arrange mechanisms to spy, snitch, and squeal on the workforce. Posting the performance metrics for the whole staff to see is one way. This could be divided by team or by shift to inspire internal competitiveness toward improvements. Individual performance metrics could also be recorded, but advisably not posted for all to see (nobody wants to be made a public goat!)—rather, these private reports could be delivered only to each individual, so each can see how he or she compares with the others serving the same role, or against team averages which could be posted publicly.
14) There are lots of methods for team and process improvement. Use your managerial creativity, tempered by positive role modeling, humble support and service to your constituents, and balanced leadership to formulate your condensed advice to the boss!

Instructions for Deliverable 2:

• Prepare an Executive Memorandum from the foregoing Excel analyses and output.

Steps for preparing Executive Memorandum:

1) Acting as manager and analyst, write a two-page narrative to your new boss, the CIO.
2) The Word document should be letter-sized with 1” margins and 12-point font. To emulate an authentic memo, do not double space!
3) The memo salutation should specify these elements in the following format:
To:
From:
Date:
Subject:
4) Your narrative should summarize and describe the business impact of the information you gleaned from the Pivot Table, Pivot Chart, and Performance Evaluation, identifying issues, making a status report and recommendations for further action.
5) Do not simply describe how you executed the lab exercise—i.e., the Excel functions you performed—this is not what the CIO wants to know. She wants an overview of the business state-of-affairs in your department, and actionable recommendations:
a. What patterns and trends can you identify and illuminate?
b. What are the positives and what are the negatives?
c. What can you infer about the success or failure of the 2010 upgrade and expansion?
d. Can you explain possible (and meaningful) reasons behind what you observe?
e. What do you intend to do as DCO Manager?
f. What additional resources might you need, and how do you justify them?
6) Be sure to copy and paste special your Forecast Table to page 1 of your Executive Memorandum, and tie it in narratively to your report accordingly. Also by using the paste special, you can adjust the size and text wrap of the embedded object to take up less space in the valuable real estate of your two-page memo!
7) Use paste special to embed your Pivot Chart as a graphic image (already containing its own embedded labels and legend) to page 2 of your memo.
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18.

“Refer to Instructions Below”
Organizational Identities as
Organizational Products: Presentation
of Self Among Valley View Police
Michael E. Pacanowsky
University of Utah.
“When I first hit a woman out here, I felt like shit. I was raised
not to hit women.” It’s a sunny afternoon in February. A sergeant
is reminiscing. “She was about 98 pounds. Two of us
had to bring her down. She bit me. I hit her with everything I
had, right in the back of the head. It didn’t even phase her. My
shirt was torn and my hand was bleeding. I put my hand,,
around her neck, she was so skinny. I could practically reach
around her throat. With my thumb and finger behind her ears
sorta like this,” he demonstrates in mid-air the position of his
thumb and middle finger as if on the pressure points behind the
ears, “and we brought her down. The other officer handcuffed
her and we threw her in the car. I was so . . . you know,
. . . ,” he shrugs, indicating ‘shaken up’ or ‘full of emotion,’
but he doesn’t say these things. “When I got in the car, I
shoved the flashlight in her face and said, ‘The next time I’ll
just shove this thing down your throat first.’ She just looked at
me and said, ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ ”
This story comes from a police sergeant as he cruised down one of
Valley View’s placid neighborhood streets, reflecting on his experiences
as a cop.’ I suspect that each cop has a similar story—one that captures
his transformation from somebody-just-like-anybody-else to a cop.
Just like anybody else, this cop was raised to not hit a woman, and the
first time he does it, there is genuine regret. Just like anybody else, he
thought women were fragile little things, yet (surprise!) a shot to the
back of the head doesn’t leave this one limp or manageable and it takes
two cops to bring her down. And just like anybody else who has been
through a flight and whose shirt is ripped and whose hand is bleeding,
and who has suffered the rage of being forced to do what before he
always would not do, he threatens physical violence to this hellcat and
(surprise!) she shows no remorse, she shows no fear. Rather, she
taunts, and he naively didn’t realize that all along it had been a
“joke.” Now the point of this story is, I think, clear. Whatever the
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listener might think this cop is, he is not that cop because of a personality
quirk or moral deficiency. Once he was like everybody else, but
no longer. His experiences as a cop have transformed him. ^
I find this story particularly interesting because I call myself an
organizational communication scholar and, as this story is told by
someone at work and about work, it seems to me to qualify as an
excellent sample of organizational communication. Yet I find the
story’s relevance to what we think of as organizational communication
is not immediately obvious. I submit that this seeming “irrelevance”
stems from the fact that the story eludes our scholarly notions of what
an organization is and, more importantly, what the role of communication
in organizations is. I think that by looking at this story and others
like it, we can surely learn something more about communication in a
particular organization—the Valley View Police Department—and, at
the same time, we may learn something more about organizational
communication generally.
For most organizational scholars, organizations are places where
people work to get jobs done. For most organizational communication
scholars, this conceptualization of organizations requires but slight
amendment: organizations are places where people communicate to get
jobs done.’ So basic is this understanding of organizations that
“people” and “communication” are typically conceptualized as
“inputs” to organizational functioning.’* Thus, the driving question of
most organizational research is: How can the individual be induced to
contribute to the effective functioning of the organization? ^ And the
driving question of most organizational communication research is,
similarly: How can the individual be induced to communicate in a way
that contributes to the effective functioning of the organization? ^
What I want to call particular attention to here is the sequence
implied in such conceptualizations of organizations and organizational
communication: people work and communicate, jobs get done. Or in
more “gussied up” terms, performances by organizational personnel
precede organizational products. What I think this story by the Valley
View sergeant invites us to do, and what I want to do in this paper, is to
turn upside-down these commonsense notions of inputs, outputs, and
organizational sequencing. That is, I would argue, this story is not so
much about how the performances of organizational personnel affect
organizational functioning, it is rather about how organizational
functioning affects organizational personnel. The sergeant in this story
is not so much an input to the product (peaceful community), he is the
output, the product itself. Or, in other terms, his transformation from
somebody-just-like-anybody-else to a cop has been the result of
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functioning within a particular organization. Our scholarly notion that
performances of organizational personnel precede organizational
products is only half the story. The other half is that the organization,
in its functioning, makes products of its personnel. And so, without
questioning the legitimacy of research aimed at ascertaining what a
person’s communication contributes to organizational functioning, I
want in this paper instead to ascertain what organizational functioning
contributes to a person’s communication.
To reformulate what I have been saying: We need to recognize that
when people work, and when they talk at work and about work, they
are doing more than getting a job done, or greasing the social machinery
to get a job done. They are, in addition, presenting themselves as
people with particular organizationally-produced identities, and this
presentation of organizational self occurs as they locate themselves
through their talk in particular relation to their work, to their coworkerSy
to their communities, and to themselves as people.
Most of us who study organizational communication have been so
preoccupied with the relationship of organizational communication to
organizational effectiveness that we have overlooked other functions of
communication in organizations. I would argue that concern for such
things as “communication and the presentation of organizational
selves” is not simply a legitimate area of research, but a necessary one if
we are ever to develop a comprehensive notion of the role of communication
in organizations.
But my argument goes farther than a mere call for descriptive
research on organizational identities. What I am arguing here is that
the way people talk about their work reveals varying degrees of appreciation
or disdain for themselves and the social fabric in which their
work is embedded. For me, the issue here is not so much the human
relations concern for employee self-esteem, but a genuinely humanistic
concern for worker self-respect.’ We need to see that work is not
merely an instrumental or social activity, but a moral activity as well,
and talk about work reveals the particular moral posture of particular
organizationally-produced identities. Or, as Ibn Khaldun suggests in
The Muqaddimah, work is a “coloring of the soul,” and talk about
work, therefore, reveals the particular hues and shades of that
coloring.*
What I want to do in the remainder of this paper is to use the Valley
View Police Department as an examplar organization to show how talk
is used in the presentation of organizationally-determined identities,
and to show how that talk reveals the moral posture of those organizationally-
determined identities. Then, I want to consider some of the
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implications of this line of work for future research in organizational
communication.
Moral Identities of the Valley View Police
Conventional wisdom has it that there are four identifiable stages
in the police career: rookie, supercop, journeyman, and old soldier.’
The rookie stage is the stage of initiation, or learning the ropes. The
supercop stage comes as the officer loses his rookie callowness and
begins to understand the technical knowledge of police work. The
supercop stage is often characterized by aggressive, almost reckless
performance of police duties. After a few years of experience, the
officer enters the journeyman stage, a stage characterized by greater
maturity, greater awareness of one’s own limitations as an officer, and
a less authoritarian approach to law enforcement. The final stage, that
of old soldier, occurs after still more years of experience, when the
officer’s expectations of accomplishments and advancements go unmet
The old soldier stage is often a stage of depression and cynicism.
Our research with the Valley View Police Department was not
conducted over so extensive a period of time that we could witness any
single officer move from one of these stages to another. Nevertheless,
we could see each of these stages as the embodiment of qualitatively
different “cop identities” which reflected organizationally-induced
transformations that resulted from qualitatively different exposure to
the exigencies and experiences associated with the role of police
officer. The question before us then is: How are these different organizational
identities constituted in the talk of the Valley View cops? I
propose to fashion an answer to this question by examining the t a l k –
stories, jokes, commentaries, exchanges—associated with each of the
four different cop identities.
Rookie. Clifford Geertz reports that among the Javanese, there is
ndurung djawa, that is used to refer to children, simpletons, boors, and
others who are “not yet Javanese.'”” Among the Valley View police,
there is a comparable term, “rookies,” and it means, “not yet cops.”
In popular conception, the rookie is the police officer fresh out of the
police academy. In Utah, however, thanks to an expedient statute that
merely requires a police officer to attend the police academy sometime
within 18 months of joining a police force, a rookie is often a cop who
has not yet been to the academy. Minimally trained—often with no
more than an interview or two with the chief, a week of instruction
21
from a sergeant, and two weeks of riding along with a regular police
officer—rookies are understandably considered not full-fledged cops.
The talk of the rookie officers displays this status of “not yet cops” in
several ways.
First, in conversation with senior officers, the rookie cop often
avoids talking “like a cop.” In most of the “bullshit sessions” where
the cops were detailing their exploits, the rookies tended to sit quietly,
listen attentively, and not offer any exploits of their own for consideration.
Their status as rookies did not entitle them to the floor. Even
more telling was the occassion when a senior officer who was trying to
complete an entry on his incident log asked a rookie for the time. The
rookie hesitated, then replied “4:30” instead of using the appropriate
police terminology “1630.” The rookie assuredly knew the appropriate
terminology (even rookies keep incident logs according to military
time), still the rookie was apparently self-conscious about assuming
undue status before the senior officer, and chose instead not to talk like
a cop.
The stories that rookies tell often call particular attention to their
status as “not yet cops.” Rookies are often assigned to “dead dog
calls,” a generic name that covers virtually all unpleasant assignments,
but that takes its name from the calls the rookie will get to remove a
dead dog from the middle of a roadway. The catch to these assignments
is that some senior officer will almost always time his patrol so
that he can drive by and wave to the rookie just about at the time the
rookie is dragging the carcass from the road. One rookie told this
classic “dead dog” story:
After I had been on the force for just a little over a month, the
sergeant had me go on a call to investigate a drunk woman at a
bar. When I got there, she was lying on the floor . . . . out
cold. She was about five feet tall and weighed about 300
pounds. I couldn’t even budge her. Had to call for a back-up.
When somebody came, they really gave it to me. (Mimicking
the ridicule) “Hey, Rogers, what’s wrong? Ain’t you in
shape?” I found out later her name is Debbie Hollings and
whenever she gets so drunk she passes out, the owner of the bar
calls the cops. They knew it was her all the time. Just wanted
to give me the call so they could sit back and laugh.
What’s important here is not the fact that this type of hazing of preinitiates
occurs, but that the rookie chooses to tell a story about, and
thus identify himself as a police officer whose status permits this kind
of treatment by other cops.
22
Yet for all this, the rookie is, in someways, most enamoured among
all the Valley View cops of being a police officer. Why? For one thing,
police life is still new, the rookie hasn’t yet experienced police work as
routine or tedious. For another thing, even in their typical assignments
as traffic cops (not a highly valued assignment for most Valley View
cops, by the way), rookies are able to live out some of the dramatic
fantasies of being cops—the rush of adrenalin when they accelerate to
catch a speeder, the tingling wariness that accompanies each approach
of a stopped vehicle, and the sense of power that comes from writing up
citations.
But, I would suggest, there is another important—and typically
overlooked—reason for their pleasure with being cops: their particular
understanding of the role of the police officer vis-a-vis the community.
Rookies present themselves as genuinely interested in the welfare of the
citizenry they are hired to police. It was a rookie who, having pulled
over a 17-year-old woman for speeding and having written her a ticket,
sent her on her way by saying without any trace of sarcasm, “Please
drive carefully now. We don’t want our young ladies to get in accidents.
Have a good day now.” ”
Another officer told this story of his rookie days:
I got this call to rush over to this duplex, the (gas utility) guy
was already there, and there was gas all over the place, they
thought it was an attempted suicide. All the rest of our cars
were dispatched, so they sent over a county cop to back me up.
We got there and you could smell the gas all over. We found
the kitchen window, and kicked that open. Then we went to
the back door, and opened that. Then we went opening doors
as we went through the house to look for the guy who was supposed
to be inside. Then we came to a closet-type thing and the
door was jammed, like someone leaning on it. We pushed it
open, and there’s this guy, eyes all watery and woozy, trying to
strike a match (mimes the man trying to strike a match while
woozy). The deputy grabs his hands so he can’t strike the
match, and he falls over some boxes. They were really struggling.
I tried to help out, but the room was too small, and I
couldn’t get inside. It was really touch and go for awhile. . . .
So (after we got the matches away from him), we took him outside
and reasoned with him about life being worth living, and
he went off with his girlfriend. He was something. He had
even knocked (at the door of the adjoining duplex), just to
make sure nobody was at home before he turned on the gas.
You know, I’d just never have that kind of experience in any
other j o b . . . ”
23
What is significant in this story is not so much the recounting of the
rookie’s participation in a real police experience—the intense uncertainty
of the situation, the scuffle with a man who must be physically
restrained, the danger, the saving of a life. What is more significant, I
think, is the manner in which the man attempting suicide is portrayed.
The rookie portrays the man as a life worth saving, not as a hassle, or as
a threat to his personal safety. And that kind of portrayal of the
incident is characteristically “rookie” (as we shall see when we consider
more tenured cops), because the story portrays a genuine respect for
the person saved. There is no dispargement of the attempted suicide, no
black humor about how it might have been better if he had gotten there
a few minutes later. Rookies present themselves as least contemptuous
of the citizenry, and I suggest that it is this moral stance which allows
them to take great satisfaction in their role as cops.
The supercop. The significant experience that transforms the
rookie into the supercop is an eight-week stint at the state police
academy. When he returns to the force, the supercop presents himself
as having fused the gung-ho enthusiasm of his rookie days with a new
found savvy cultivated in formal training. The supercop displays an
admiration for technical competence in the performance of police
work. One cop just back from the academy spoke in glowing terms
about the kinds of things he had just learned:
These guys with degrees in psychology were talking about cultures.
For example, they said that it’s not smart to handcuff a
Mexican father in front of his family. If you do, you’re in for
the fight of your life. They got a real dominance thing and they
have to be macho for the family, got to be strong. But get him
outside and he’ll even put his hands behind his back for you.
The supercop displays a confidence in his ability to do police work
successfully, a confidence based (perhaps naively) on the body of
technical knowledge that tells him what he should do to handle specific
situations. The supercop also makes it clear that he pays attention to
what he should not do. Another supercop told us:
Some guys get so worked up that they can’t handle a situation.
There were these officers (not on the Valley View force) who
got in a chase with some people. The chase can really get you
worked up, and if you don’t have control of yourself, you can
easily make things a mess. So these officers pulled the car over
and made the guys get on the ground face first. An officer was
holding a gun to the back of one of the guys heads and it went
24
off. The officer was relieved when he found out the gun missed
the guy and hit the ground about a half inch from his head.
From the supercop’s point of view, the moral is clear. As a cop,
you have to know what’s going on; you have to remain in control. In a
chase, you have to know that you can get worked up. Ignorance of this
fact can lead to professional failure. Knowledge of it allows the officer
to prepare himself to remain in control of the situation.
This display of appreciation the supercop develops for technical
competence is accompanied by a display of disdain for those who lack
such competence. One supercop attributed the morale problems among
police to the fact that “in every police force in the country, the head
administrator is the mayor, someone who doesn’t know anything about
police work.”‘^
The supercop, with his new-found assurance that he knows what to
do to control a situation, becomes a vigorous law enforcer. The law
becomes a black-or-white matter, and all transgressions must be dealt
with. While senior officers tend to exercise quite a bit of discretion in
enforcing the law, supercops tend to stick to the letter of the law. This
by-the-book attitude extends even to traffic enforcement. From our
notes:
The officer (a supercop) sees another expired inspection sticker,
but the radar gun goes off and reads 44 (it’s a 30 mph zone.)
The officer flips a U and we chase her. He has to turn on the
flashers before she flnally pulls over. The officer approaches
the car with his hand on his gun. He smiles and says good afternoon.
He walks back to the patrol car smiling from ear to ear
and says, “We have the privilege of speeding, expired registration,
and expired driver’s license. And I’m not gonna let her go
(on any of them) either.”
The supercop presents himself as being fully committed to the idea
that stopping crime is just a matter of the vigorous exercise of technical
knowledge, as though, if he just worked hard enough, he could put a
dent in the crime problem. Supercops often ride-along with fellow officers,
after they’ve already put in an eight-hour shift that day. Supercops
also talk about the details they’ve done on their own—those times
they’ve investigated a crime or staked out a likely crime location during
their off-duty hours.
These attitudes of the supercop—confidence in technical knowledge,
proclivity to enforce all laws, fundamental belief in the eradicability
of crime—are apparently common among fledgling cops everywhere.
In cop parlance, it’s known as being “badge heavy.” The
25
Valley View lieutenant described it as being a problem of the badge
being too big, and “until they get that badge to the size that it hangs on
their shirt, you really have a difHcult officer to deal with.”
A senior officer recounted a “badge heavy” incident from his early
days on the force:
One day I was jogging somewhere in Sandy when a carload of
kids came by and swerved to spray me with a large pile of slush
that just happened to be there. I got hit with slush from head
to foot. The area was a subdivision. Because of the car’s direction
of travel, I figured that the kids had just entered the area
and were probably going somewhere nearby. So I went to my
car and started checking the area out. Sure enough, I spotted
the kids’ car parked in an unpaved parking lot, and I paid the
occupants a little visit. I snuck up on them and were they surprised
when I stuck my pistol in their faces. I made them all get
out and lie on their faces in the mud while I called in to check
out the vehicle and its occupants.
(Some years having passed since the incident occurred, the officer
reflected on it from his more mature perspective. He added, “I believe
I would handle that situation with a little more restraint now.”)
From the way the supercop describes himself and police work, we
can see a new stage in the moral development of the cop. The supercop
has shed many of the more fantastic notions of romantic heroism that
inspire the rookie cop, and has come to appreciate the cop role in terms
of mastery of technical knowledge. But this casting off of illusion
comes at a price. Control of others supplants aid to others as the
dominant goal. Although the supercop shows no real contempt for
other people (except perhaps for mayors who should know better), the
supercop has no real passion for them either. They are objects on his
professional landscape, objects his knowledge of cop ways will allow
him to control.
The journeyman cop. Unlike the very visible transformation from
rookie to supercop signaled by graduation from the police academy, the
transformation from supercop to journeyman cop takes place gradually
as the experiences of day-to-day police routines accumulate. Like the
cop who said he would handle the kids in the slush-spraying car with
more restraint now, the journeyman cop presents himself as someone
for whom the passions of his supercop days have become muted, tempered.
In some ways, experience has hardened and made more useful
his supercop notions. But in other ways, experience has dampened
these notions, and made them more livable.
26
The journeyman cop still shows an appreciation for technical
knowledge, but that appreciation has been forged in the crucible of the
real world, not just the classroom. One cop who we thought was
merely displaying bravado in his claim that he loved to investigate
traffic fatalities was additionally speaking about the gratifications he
enjoyed from using his technical knowledge.
Like I was saying, I hate for traffic fatalities to happen but
they’re gonna happen and when they do, you know, that’s my
thing. If you get out here on a regular accident, you take their
driver’s license and you ask them what happened and you ask
the other party what happened and you can usually figure out
in a couple of minutes what really occurred. But you get there
when somebody’s killed, you know, that can come up to any
kind of law suit. You want to know exactly what occurred and
why it happened and it’s just conipletely different. It’s a step
above the normal everyday traffic investigation. Everything
has to be exact; you got to know exactly what you’re doing.
And then you can really get into, you know, your coefficiencies
of friction . . . let me give you an idea . . . speed is 5.5 the
square of distance times friction plus or minus the superelevation
of the grade. Then you got combined speed which is
velocity lost during the skid plus velocity lost upon impact, and
the equation for that is combined speed squared plus speed
squared. It’s really not that hard, but the majority of cops, you
ask them to figure out combine speed and they don’t even
know what you’re talking about. You may go into critical
speeds like on a curve that designed for 55 is really designed for
70 and when you pass 70 miles per hour, you’ll start getting a
critical speed scuff mark. And there are equations for figuring
out exactly how fast he went around that curve. Then you got
fiip speed, you know, how fast someone going around a curve
that caused him to fiip. Then like if you got someone coming
off an embankment, there’s an equation for figuring out how
far he dropped or how far he went across the drop or even
through an open area, say you got a car going through an open
area and he hits a gully, there’s equations for figuring out how
fast he was going across that. And you know, that’s my thing.
I love math to begin with. Math is, you know, straight As
through elementary school and junior high school. Straight Fs
in citizenship. (Laughs.)
What the journeyman cop is saying is that, through experience, the
technical knowledge he learned at the academy has been transformed
into real technical competence. And, as in this story, this technical
competence in itself is presented as a source of satisfaction for the
journeyman cop. (Technical competence is also a source of satisfaction
27
because it is the source of respect from other cops. The officer who
loved traffic fatalities was admired because “he’s real good; he can get
past the bodies.” Another cop was respected for his ability to read
fingerprints and make identifications without the use of a microscope.
Two journeymen cops were greatly respected for their vigilance and
patrolling skills.) The same experience which has transformed his
technical knowledge into technical competence has also taught the
journeyman cop the limits of that competence. Instead of maintaining,
as the supercop does, that with sufficient diligence the cop can always
be on top of things, he now claims that the world, for the cop, is basically
uncertain, that “the scene can turn to shit in a minute,” and that
knowledge and competence cannot guarantee control in all situations.
As the world becomes personally more uncertain, his attitude
toward the world becomes more tentative. The journeyman cop no
longer describes law enforcement in black-or-white terms. “I’m not
much into traffic,” said one journeyman cop. “I’m more interested in
crime. Oh, sometimes I’ll stop a carload of kids if they look like they’re
too young to be drinking beer. But I’d rather spend my time checking
out the residences of known, active criminals.” Among journeyman
cops, there are gradations in the laws to be enforced, even in the traffic
laws.
For the journeyman cop, containing crime replaces eradicating
crime as a major goal. But even this more limited attempt is presented
as being destined to be frustrated. One officer spotted some “suspicious
characters” parked across the street from a grocery store that
had been the target of a rash of recent robbery attempts. He pulled up
behind their car, then waited for them to start moving. They did (“it
really makes you wonder what they’re up to when they pull aWay as
soon as they spot us; could be they’re just our resident paranoids”) and
the officer escorted them to the city limits. “That happens a lot,” the
cop said. “You don’t stop ’em, you just scare ’em away to somebody
else’s beat. You know, you see somebody suspicious and you make ’em
nervous and they move along, and the next day you read that that car
was involved in a burglary somewhere else in the valley.”
Unlike the supercop who tends to view people as aggregated
objects, the journeyman cop differentiates among types of people—
although his evaluations are, on the surface, somewhat paradoxical.
“The masses are asses,” he will say about people in the abstract. But
for many of the regulars on his beat, the journeyman cop often shows
warm, paternalistic feelings of concern. About the woman who
claimed the Hell’s Angels rode out from California to rape her and are
now threatening her over the phone, the journeyman cop says, “She
28
may be whacko, but it isn’t wise to completely dismiss what she has to
say.” And so he listens professionally to her new fears, tries to allay
them, and tells her to call if anything concrete comes of the phone calls.
Of consider the drunk who has a tendency toward violence when he’s
had too much alcohol. Even in taking him to jail, the journeyman cop
talks to him in a soothing manner, and tells him he’s taking him in “for
your own good.”
So, when the problem people get treated personally, how do the
masses become asses? Interestingly, it’s not by fiagrant abuse of the
law, but by what the journeyman cop sees as an insensitive abuse of the
cops. One journeyman told this incident:
I responded to this fight at the junior high. One girl had a
bloody lip and a pinched tit so her mother called us in. I talked
to all the girls involved. It was one of these “you’re a whore”
“no, you’re a whore” kind of things. So I told the mother I
could file a complaint or just an incident report, it was up to
her. So she decided on an incident report. I told her okay, but
is she changed her mind and wanted to file a complaint, she
should just call me that night and I’d file a complaint. Well, I
didn’t hear from her so I didn’t think anything of it. The next
day one of the detectives said the woman had called and
bitched because I didn’t do anything. Now sometimes when
something like this happens, it doesn’t bother me. If this was a
scrote who didn’t like cops, it would be one thing, but an average
citizen does it and you kind of get mad.
In terms of moral posture, the journeyman cop is a classic existential
hero. The world falling down around him, he has no “illusions”
about being able to save it. Misunderstood by people who he feels
should’ know better, he allows himself some bittersweet disappointment,
but tries not to harbor any vengefulness toward them. The few
attachments he does make are often to the outcasts on his regular
beat—the drunks, the mentally unstable, the losers of various sorts.
Still, he keeps plugging away, trying to wrest some satisfaction from
doing a job as well as it can be done.
The old soldier. Just as the transformation from supercop to
journeyman is not marked by any single rite of passage, so the transformation
from journeyman to old soldier is not signaled by any one event
Both transformations occur gradually. But where the transformation
to journeyman comes about as a result of accumulated experience, the
transformation to old soldier comes about as a result of the accumulation
of negative—dissatisfying, frustrating—experiences. The old
29
soldier presents himself as the quintessential cynic.
Perhaps this cynicism among Valley View’s old soldiers is an outgrowth
of the lack of opportunity for professional advancement on a
small-town police force. (There is only one lieutenant and one chief.)
Ironically, though, some of the biggest cynics are sergeants. Again, this
is perhaps because making sergeant in Valley View is seen as a dubious
promotion. Sergeants do just about everything that patrol officers do,
but as shift supervisor they spend more time checking up on their men
(and less time “in action”) and they are also responsible for keeping
incident reports on all their men. One sergeant bitterly described it:
“Seventy-five to eighty percent of our job is filling out reports. Some
people say that we’re not really policemen, just office clerks.”
The old soldier has a decidedly negative view of the public. “Our
contact with the public is always negative,” one cynic said by way of
explanation. “Ticket writing, arresting, all our contact is negative. It’s
very easy to end up feeling very negative about the public. Some of the
people we deal with are real assholes. I mean real assholes—as mean as
they can be, angry as hell against any kind of authority.” This officer
wanted to differentiate between “assholes” and everyone else. “The
people we deal with are not the average, every-day public. The average
person does not have many problems. The people who call us are out
of work, they’re leeches stirring shit. We deal with the same people day
in and day out. Us against them. A uniform and a badge aren’t going
to save your ass.” And so, although the old soldier might want to
differentiate between assholes and everyone else, his constant experience
is with assholes. “Average people” are, in some sense, mythical,
a last hope this old soldier holds on to. Another old soldier no longer
holds on to even that hope: “I’m tired of the nuts in this city. I’m tired
of babysitting people who are too feebleminded to help themselves. I’m
tired of the hassles. I’m tired of the small town politics.”
The negative attitude toward people displays itself in negative
responses to people. Old soldiers are often rude and abrupt in dealing
with the public. One old soldier claims he has to be suspicious of all
people. “Ninety percent of police that get killed, it’s because they’ve
become too complacent, not alert enough, too trustworthy of people.”
Two old soldiers pulled into a school parking lot on a Saturday to
“shoot the shit.” Four Chicanos, maybe in their early teens, came to
the playground to fly balsa wood airplanes propelled by rubber bands.
Officer 1: Looks like a hang-gliding club. Fuckin’ bunch of
Mexicans going to hold onto their planes and hangglide
. . . . You might say those Mexicans are all
30
wound up. (One of the boys, quite overweight,
races across the playground and heaves his plane
into the air; it flies erratically and crashes into some
bushes near the school building.) That’s Viva
Zapata!
Officer 2: Remember the Alamo!
Officer 1: Fly Mexican Airways. (Pause.) These guys are
practicing to fly weed out of Mexico.
Officer 2: Can you imagine? Mexicans flying planes.
Officer 1: Looks like they’re having fun. At least they’re off
the street, not stabbing anybody.
Racist? No doubt. But the old soldier explained it this way.
“Police officers see so much shit, and they see it first hand. It’s hard to
remove yourself from that, it’s a reality to you. That’s why we joke
about it so much, we’re not being crude, that’s the only way we can
deal with it. If you lived through and accepted the trouble we see,
you’d be in an institution in a week.” Perhaps. But in terms of moral
development, the cycle has come full-circle. From the rookie who
believed that people were worth heroic effort, we have come to the old
soldier who can deal with people only by placing an intransversable gulf
between himself and them. And where has the joy of police work gone?
There seems to be none. It’s just no fun bustin’ your ass for a bunch of
leeches.
Implications
At the outset of this article, I argued that our traditional notions of
organizational communication tend to have us look at communication
and people as inputs to organizational functioning, where we could as
easily and as profitably look at them as outputs of organizational
functioning. That is, instead of concentrating on the configurations of
personality traits and communication strategies necessary for effective
communication in organizations, we could as easily concentrate on the
organizational identities people develop as a consequence of their
organizational experience, and we could further examine their talk at
work and about work as a presentation of those identities. I hope that
this examination of the talk of the Valley View cops in terms of their
organizational identities is an intriguing and convincing demonstration
of the potential of this approach. There are two particular arenas of
future research that, I think, this approach invites us to enter.
First, we can begin to look at organizational identities in a more
systematic way. There are two promising starting points for such a
venture, and we may find that research emanating from each will
31
converge. We can either begin with organizational self-presentations
and attempt to fabricate categories of organizational identities, or we
can proceed, as I did here, with conventional (or scholarly) categories
of organizational identities, and attempt to elaborate the communicative
features of each. Studs Terkel’s book Working is an untapped gold
mine as a resource for anyone interested in the first approach.”
Michael Maccoby’s identification of four organizational types—craftsman,
jungle fighter, organization man, and gamesman—is a possible
source for the second approach.'” What is crucial in either approach is
the understanding that what counts as appropriate data is not a set of
numbers with pre-packaged interpretations reflecting attitudes about,
or aggregations of, or intentions behind communication activity, but
descriptions of that communication activity itself. We need to see the
people talk.
Second, we can begin to look at organizational communication as
not only a task or social activity, but a moral activity as well. I think
this addition to our perspective is crucial. The “bottom line” seems to
have become some kind of transcendant value in our increasingly
organized world,” and organizational communication researchers seem
to have been all too eager or willing to acquiesce to its demands. I
would argue that the transformation of the Valley View cops from
romantic to idealist to realist to cynic is not simply the social psychological
phenomenon of “burn out” (to use the term now in vogue). It is
instead a moral phenomenon. And the fact that a similar moral decaying
is found not only among police, but among social workers, nurses,
and even (God forbid!) college professors is a portent that it is not the
people in the profession, but perhaps the organization (institutionalization,
bureaucratization) of the profession that is morally bankrupting.
Over the years, organizational communication research seems to
have attracted its share of “organizational cheerleaders.” I believe it is
perhaps time that it attracted some critics as well. I can only hope that
the approach I have outlined here will encourage those who consider
themselves humanists as well as (or more than) social scientists to
contribute to the dialogue on the meaning and significance of communication
in organizations.
Notes
1. Valley View is a fictitious name for a community in the Salt Lake Valley
where this study was conducted. Likewise, all names of police officers
and places have been changed. I would like to thank the members of the
research team who assisted me in this study: Nick O’Donnell-Trujillo,
32
Tom Walker, Kip Jenkins, Lynette Eastland, and Jeannie Young. I
would also like to comment on the frequent use of the word “cop” in this
article. I mean nothing pejorative in using that term. When the police
officers were talking to us in their “professional” manner, particularly in
the beginning of the study, they referred to themselves as “police officers.”
After they became comfortable with us, and among themselves,
they often used the term “cop.”
2. The question of what causes cops to be the people they are is at the heart
of a long-running debate among psychologists and sociologists. In a
review of literature, Joel Lefkowitz, “Psychological Attributes of Policemen:
A Review of Research and Opinion,” Journal of Social Issues, 31
(1975), 3-26, concludes that previous research makes a stronger case for
cops being psychologically like everyone else, and the case for unique
psychological traits—such as authoritarianism—is weak. Arthur
Niederhoffer, himself once a police officer, in Behind the Shield: The
Police in Urban Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company,
1967) argues strongly that police are transformed by the administrative
system of policing and by contacts with the people they typically must
deal with.
3. I have discussed the managerial bias prevalent in so much organizational
communication research in another article. Please see Michael E.
Pacanowsky and Nick O’Donnell-Trujillo, “Communication and
Organizational Cultures,” Western Journal of Speech Communication,
forthcoming.
4. See, for example, Richard V. Farace, Peter R. Monge, and Hamish M.
Russell, Communicating and Organizing (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1977) or Everett M. Rogers and Rekha Agarwala-Rogers, Communication
in Organizations (New York: The Free Press, 1976).
5. Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Developing Organizations (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969).
6. Because attention in most organizational communication research is
focused on getting the job done, we probe for answers about networks,
climate, underload, distortion, and so forth which appear to have some
relevance to organizational effectiveness. Even when we concern ourselves
with the social aspects of communication—self-esteem, authenticity,
relationships with co-workers, and the like—we are often doing
no more than making sure that social communication does not hinder or
interfere with, and perhaps even assists, the smooth flow of task-related
communication.
7. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner
Books, 1979), pp. 312-317. Michael Maccoby, in The Gamesman (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), offers a substantive critique of such
“human relations” theories as those of Maslow and MacGregor.
8. Quoted in Robert Schrank, Ten Thousand Working Days (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 15.
9. Douglas S. Drummond, Police Culture (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage, 1976).
33
10. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,
(1973).
11. I remind those readers who may think this comment could not be delivered
unsarcastically that the exchange took place in Utah, one of the remaining
bastions of traditional sex roles, if not gallantry.
12. Police tend to believe they would be most effective if outsiders maintained
a “hands-off” position with respect to the police department. “The legal
system is untrustworthy; policemen make the best decisions about guilt or
innocence” and “Policemen can most accurately identify crime and
criminals” are two assumptions at the heart of the police occupational
culture revealed in a review of literature reported by Peter K. Manning,
“The Police: Mandate, Strategies, and Appearances,” in Crime and
Justice in American Society, ed. Jack D. Douglas (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
MerrUl, 1971), pp. 149-193.
13. Working (New York: Avon, 1975).
14. Maccoby.
15. This argument is developed in some detail by William G. Scott and David
K. Hart in Organizational America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
34

Review the attached article and write a 5 page double-spaced page word-processed essay following traditional essay format with an introduction, a body and a conclusion) that will include the following material:

1) Briefly summarize the major theme of the work and state what was the author’s purpose in writing it. (2-3 Paragraphs)

2) What is the scope of this essay? What are the limits of the subject matter; what is included and what is excluded? What theoretical or philosophical perspective does the author seem to hold (e.g. “critical,” “functional”?) Identify the supporting ideas or premises on which the author bases his/her ideas. (2-3 Paragraphs)

3) Identify those ideas or conclusions that would seem to generate the most interest, insight or controversy for readers. (1-2 Paragraphs)

4) Discuss the implications of the author’s ideas regarding communication and organizations. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the article? Address the specific methods the study employed. Do the methods employed provide appropriate evidence to support the conclusions? (Give specific examples from the work and cite page numbers, etc. — Are the assumptions sound; is the evidence convincing; are the explanations complete; is the writing clear? Specifically address the arguments the author(s) is making and the evidence offered to support those claims. (3-4 paragraphs)

5) How did you like the article? Did you learn anything of value? Where might you go to learn more about this work’s subject? (Please give at least three additional sources that are not listed in the references of the work.) (1-2 paragraphs and references)

 
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