ABSTRACT
This chapter is an excerpt from Srikant Sarangi and Stefaan Slembrouck’s book Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control. An important method in Sarangi and Slembrouck’s study is the way they seek support for their position through the opinions of those who have direct contact with the bureaucratic encounters studied. A significant expression of institutional discourse, bureaucracy is the scrutiny and categorization by state institutions of all areas of social activity. The chapter focuses on and examines a number of ‘bureaucratic events’. It looks at the ways in which institutional representatives address and construct clients, with particular emphasis on the leaflets and application forms that are central to this type of categorization. Citizens become ‘clients’ when they enter a bureaucratic process, and this process is driven by categorization and coding. Citizens therefore no longer exist as individuals but as fixed, named categories such as ‘tax payer’, ‘job seeker’, and ‘single parent’.
