ABSTRACT
As Peter Barry best expressed it in Beginning Theory, ‘we are looking … for something we can use’ (2002: 8). What better place to look than where it is being used. Stephen Barley’s paper represented one of the first attempts to apply semiotic ideas to the analysis of human behaviour in work contexts. It was first published in 1983 in the Administrative Science Quarterly where it was unlikely that his audience would have encountered semiotic ideas. To remedy this he offered crisp definitions of key concepts in semiotics. Barley begins with a definition-come-history of semiotics, which he characterises as the study of signs, codes, and culture.
Semiotics is an eclectic and amorphous field that traces its roots to the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), the father of modern structural linguistics, and to the pragmatic philosophy of Charles Peirce (1958). Defined as the study of signs or systems of signs, semiotics concerns the principles by which signification occurs. Signification refers both to the processes by which events, words, behaviours, and objects carry meaning for the members of a given community, and to the content they convey. Therefore, semiotics is ultimately the study of how communication is possible, since all communication presumes shared codes. The essence of semiotics is the isolation of systems of signification and the rules that govern their use.
