Abstract
The HBO series “The Wire” ran for five seasons, and many consider it one of the best series ever to run on television. At the heart of the series’ power is the creator’s conscious portrayal of institutions in process. Creator David Simon said in an interview that the series “ . . . is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason” (Hornby, 2007). With this awareness of institutions also come plotlines that witness institutional processes and remarkable dialog in which these processes are given voice by actors.
What is important for scholars in institutional theory is that Simon talks about institutions in very much the same way that institutional theorists talk about them. As a result, the language and genres used in the series provide a window into the workings of institutions. Bringing an ethnographer’s sensibility to “The Wire,” Simon and the series writers have generated a rich text for understanding institutions-in-process.
In this piece, Zundel, Holt, and Cornelissen use the dialog and plotlines in “The Wire” as a resource for examining institutional work as process—as relationships in continual movement. They exploit the television medium’s capacity to manage multiple venues, plots, and characters; its ability to accommodate nonrecursivity, sequence, and time; and its inclusion of more than just language—all types of symbols can be recognized, including objects, paralanguage, music, and color. What traditional institutional research might not be able to “say,” a work of art can. As the authors point out, this novel source gets them past the empirical problem often encountered in research on institutional work—how do we handle descriptions of agency and institutions without creating descriptively convenient, but artificial categories?
The authors also contribute to the ongoing elaboration of institutional work by bringing the work of Gregory Bateson to the analysis. Bateson’s perspective sensitizes us to the error of seeing stability and even clears conceptual distinctions between agency and institutions when we look at them from a distance. Instead, the authors use Bateson’s anthropological orientation to see how agency and institutions are played out in patterns of relationships in flux.
Newcomb and Hirsch (1994) once argued that television is our national medium and that the study of television is an important way to study culture (Newcomb & Hirsch, 1994). They see creators of series as cultural interpreters whose products merit study. As institutions have increasingly become the subject of their art, a rich resource for study has opened up for institutional and organizational researchers. This article demonstrates the promise of such a program of research.