Rodney J. Clarke - Böcker

Organizational semiotics is a discipline that is concerned with the interrelationships between individuals and groups, and between humans and technology, functioning in organizations and society. Organizational semiotics opens up the prospect of theory-building and the development of new methods and techniques to gain insights into organized behaviour and enacted social practices, in the presence and absence of various technologies. It shares common interests with many other approaches to information and organizations, such as computer science, computational semiotics, organizational engineering, and language action perspective. The common vision shared by these approaches is to treat organizations and related information systems and technologies within a unified semiotic framework, with particular reference to the huge range of issues that elude many traditional disciplines. The analysis and design of information systems develops methods for solving the practical problems but offers no rigorous, theoretical foundation for them or how information functions within and between organizations.The semiotic perspective accommodates the individual and the social, the human and the technical, intra- and inter-organizational interactions, at a level of detail that is required in the study, modelling, design, and engineering of new and alternative organizational and technical systems. This perspective is outlined in the chapter presentations in this work.

Organisational semiotics occupies an important niche in the research community of human communication and information systems. It opens up ways of understanding the functioning of information and information resources in organised behaviour. This text aims to bridge the gap between the technical and social aspects of information systems and information technology. The chapters in the book are divided into two major sections. The first section deals with Communication and pragmatics, and organisational systems, while section two concentrates on organisational systems, which may or may not include a computer system as a component. All the chapters in the volume have been submitted to a review process of discussants and peer reviews.

This text discusses real information systems in which technologies have an essential role to play. It develops this perspective using the established discipline of semiotics, the theory of signs. A sign is anything that stands for something else within a certain community. This fundamental notion supports a unified treatment of human and technical aspects of information systems. The book covers such issues as: fundamental concepts such as "information", "data", "message", "communication", "knowledge", "organization", "system" and so forth. It comprises the proceedings of the Working Conference on Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in July 2001.

Coordination And Communication Using Signs: Studies in Organisational Semiotics is a cutting-edge volume that bridges the gap between the technical and social aspects of information systems and information technology. The chapters in the book are divided into two major sections. The first section deals with Communication and Pragmatics, and Organisational Systems and the following topics are examined: the semiotic framework and natural language; coordination and communication using natural language and other artifacts in a real-life setting; substantive-level issues of information systems and business processes from several theoretical perspectives; language as action; communication quality in the context of systems and business processes; organisational action and Greimas' semiotics.Section Two concentrates on organisational systems, which may or may not include a computer system as a component and examines the following topics: semiotic strategies and semiotic models of organisational structures; the impact of information technology with instructive case studies; the impact of information technology with a particular focus on sense-making in the work floor context; the design of computer information systems; improving the design quality of agent-based information systems; the design of information systems, in terms of capacity, and data scheme.All the chapters in the volume have been submitted to a review process of discussants and peer reviews.

Organisational semiotics is a discipline that is concerned with the interrelationships between individuals and groups, and between humans and technology, functioning in organisations and society. Organisational semiotics opens up the prospect of theory-building and the development of new methods and techniques to gain insights into organised behaviour and enacted social practices, in the presence and absence of various technologies. It shares common interests with many other approaches to information and organisations, such as computer science, computational semiotics, organisational engineering, and language action perspective. The common vision shared by these approaches is to treat organisations and related information systems and technologies within a unified semiotic framework, with particular reference to the huge range of issues that elude many traditional disciplines. The analysis and design of information systems develops methods for solving the practical problems but offers no rigorous, theoretical foundation for them or how information functions within and between organisations. The semiotic perspective accommodates the individual and the social, the human and the technical, intra- and inter-organisational interactions, at a level of detail that is required in the study, modelling, design, and engineering of new and alternative organisational and technical systems. This perspective is outlined in the chapter presentations of Information, Organisation and Technology.

Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems covers such issues as: -Fundamental concepts such as 'information', 'data', 'message', 'communication', 'knowledge', 'organization', 'system' and so on;