Telling the code: Instructions for interpretation (Continued)
It was a device for accounting for why one should feel or act in the way that one did as an expectable, understandable, reasonable, and above all else acceptable way of acting or feeling. It was, therefore, a way of managing a course of conversation in such a way as to present the teller (or his colleague) as a reasonable, moral, and competent fellow. The code, then is much more a method of moral persuasion and justification that it is a substantive account of an organized way of life. It is a way, or set of ways, of causing activities to be seen as morally, repetitively, and constrainedly organized.