Peter K. Manning

• Phd Sociology Duke
• Group Leader at Garfinkel Archive

Ethnography as a field should bring one face to face with one’s self or selves. When speaking to graduate students about my work, I have been oblique and offered many versions or portraits of my work. That is, if there is real portrait of a person’s work that is consequential for more than a brief time, it is rare, and this portrait is the only pos...

Total institutions is a concept developed and elaborated by Erving Goffman in Asylums . The research, the product of fieldwork, was done in a large public mental hospital and focused on the ways in which such institutions claim to be oriented to humane treatment, but in fact treat people as things to be processed. This is accomplished forcefully in...

Dramaturgy is a sociological term referring to a metaphorical perspective on social life that sees interaction as a performance for an audience. When used sociologically, dramaturgy points to a family of words associated with the idea of being sensitive to and analyzing performances that selectively emphasize some features of action to convey an im...

The sociology of the police concerns the study of the institution of policing, its structure, function, and evolution. This focus requires a sociology of knowledge, a framework that highlights how social factors shape current knowledge of police. The concept of police is a contested one and often assumed without definition. Its functions are associ...

This handbook shows how local police organizations in the United States have been the focus of reform efforts, especially due to a new crisis in the policing environment—terrorism. The problem of terrorism has raised a host of questions about how police should respond to this new threat, and this handbook aims to address these questions. It also di...

Fieldwork and interviews gathered over more than two years with members of the Garda, the Garda Inspectorate, and scholars of policing in Ireland, are used to assess the nature of accountability of the An Garda Síochána. Beginning with an overview of police accountability, the paper advances a perspective integrating the historical, emotional and s...

This paper is divided in three parts. The first part is a close reading of “High Policing and Low policing….”, Jean-Paul Brodeur’s most influential article, which was published in 1983. This discussion takes into account the refined version of this argument seen in The Policing Web, his last book. The second part is an assessment of the prescience...

This paper is divided in three parts. The first part is a close reading of “High Policing and Low policing….”, Jean-Paul Brodeur’s most influential article, which was published in 1983. This discussion takes into account the refined version of this argument seen in The Policing Web, his last book. The second part is an assessment of the prescience...

Biographical materials are used to describe the influences of John Rawls’ paper ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (1955) on my sociological work. The topics of my concern — the phenomenology of the interview, language games and their organizational context; police practices and information technologies as well as qualitative methods — were directly and indir...

All occupations, including police, must define what they do and why they do it in order to carve out and defend a socio‐economic and politically defined niche. This requires a rhetoric of justification. Crime statistics (ORCS), in spite of their frequent misuse by the police, academic criticism, and police ambivalence about their utility as a measu...

The study of policing in Anglo-American societies has been severely restricted in the last 20 years to quasi-historical overviews, studies of policing in times of stable, non-crisis periods in democratic societies that in turn had survived the crisis as democracies. Perhaps the epitome of this is the sterile textbook treatment of policing in Canada...

This paper discusses changes in British policing focussing on the ‘seventies’ to the ‘eighties’. Data are drawn from several field studies of the author, as well as secondary analysis of media reports and other research reports. The analysis is organised around police structure, Junction and image and discusses changed political context in which po...

New approaches to risk and uncertainty require a consideration of the collective nature of risks, how they are defined and managed, and how complex social organizations, especially regulatory bodies, are created and mandated to define, manage and reassure publics concerning these designated risks. Sociological analyses of risk should entail analysi...

It is argued that the systematic study of regulation should include an analysis of the structural contexts within which agencies with enforcement authority are embedded. At least four contexts affect indirectly and directly the process of regulation: the political, the economic, the scholarly and the media. The period of the mid- ‘eighties in Brita...

Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. By Erving Goffman.

This paper has two linked objectives: the first is to select those aspects of Goffman's immense body of work which continue, in my mind, to have a bearing/relevance for the organization studies field. The second is to offer one condensed empirical illustration, drawing upon an earlier published study which took purchase/inspiration from Goffman.

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...

Policing in Anglo-American countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA) has been redefined as a corporate activity. As a result of this metaphoric shift, it is expected to be efficient, effective, transparent and accountable. These expectations place the police in market competition and places pressures on them to meet objectives,...

The idea of a total institution (TI) captured what many learned observers had noted about organizations that processed people as things. The essential feature of the total institution is the effort, via regimes, tight supervision, and routinization of the movements of large groups of cohorts, to socialize inmates to the culture of the institution i...

The concept of risk and modelling it (imagining possible outcomes with negative consequences) has a long history in social science and crisis management. Risk lies in the shadow between the known and the unknown. This article reflects discussions of low-probability, high-cost events such as those reflected in the conventional tactics associated wit...

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 a...

Introduction The recent scholarly interest in terrorism and anti-terrorism as a social problem exemplifies how politics and political interests shape research. The most penetrating and lucid work is the Report of the 9/11 Commission (2004). Clearly, control of, and response to, terrorism is a question of relevance to police studies, to the governan...

If the events of September 11, 2001, could not have been predicted, and the ensuing trauma was entirely to be expected, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing rhetorical “war on terrorism,” do not appear to be the result of a strategically planned, problem-solving approach to protecting national security.1 What should be done, or...

Special events offer the potential for considerable threats to public safety. Perhaps no other special event rivals the Olympic Games in scope, duration, and potential for threat to communities, participants, and dignitaries. This paper reports on the results of a study of safety and security at the Salt Lake Olympic Games by a team of researchers...

Shifts in the structure of sentiments, taking place in two stages, underlie the emergence of existential sociology to its present significance. A challenge to Parsonian structural-functionalism initiated the first shift which was in turn followed by a period containing the development of the basis for a possible synthesis of existential sociology....

The police are legitimate, bureaucratically articulated organizations that stand ready to use force to sustain political order. Anglo-American policing (AAP) is democratic policing: It eschews torture, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, is guided by law, and seeks minimal damage to civility. Research on AAP, a policing type developed by adaptation r...

Researchers have long noted the link between police culture and coercion. To date, however, there have been no empirical studies of this relationship. Using data collected as part of a systematic social observation study of the police in Indianapolis, Indiana, and St. Petersburg, Florida, this research examines the relationship between traditional...

This book is a collection of observations around several themes that hinge on uncertainty and trust in policing as they illuminate the changes in policing over the last thirty years. Much has been made of the role of the media, politics, the new information technologies, and the apparent changes associated with community policing. This chapter cons...

Despite constant calls for reform, policing in the United States and Britain has changed little over the past thirty years. In Policing Contingencies, Peter K. Manning draws on decades of fieldwork to investigate how law enforcement works on the ground and in the symbolic realm, and why most efforts to reform the way police work have failed so far....

The article uses articles from elite publications to shape a dramaturgically informed case study exploring the decline in the official crime rate in New York City in 1996, the roles of Commissioner Bratton, the media, and the selected experts commenting upon the causes of the decline. The focal period is 1994-6, and includes news of events, such as...

The rationalization of policing, linking ends and means, and evaluating the consequences of policies and actions, is progressing in policing. It can be seen in budgeting, career planning, crime audits and performance indicators and goals. One of most powerful tools with capacity, if applied `on the ground,' to prevent, reduce and control crime and...

Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the NYPD New York: Times Books/Random House, 1997, xi + 679 pp.

The paper explores how individual chosen risk is rendered in texts using 5 recent popular best selling books. They describe high adventure in distant, exotic locales—jungles, storms, mountains, and at sea. Dramaturgical analysis, based on Kenneth Burke's pentad of actor, acts, scene, agency and purpose, reveals how differential attention to and foc...