This text examines the wide range of issues involved in bureaucratic language, illustrating the complex inter-relationships between language, bureaucracy and social control. The authors use real life, varying data in their analysis, taken from institutions in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium.

Foreword
Acknowledgements

1. Language, bureaucracy and social control
Bureaucracy
Bureacracy and social control
Language and bureaucracy
Synopsis

2. Bureaucratisation and debureaucratisation in contemporary society
Introduction: what discourse practices are construed as bureaucratic?
Bureaucratisation and debureaucratisation
Changing discourse practices as action and as process
The analysis of language use
The language-situation dynamic
Social control as an area of struggle
Conclusion

3. The pragmatics of information exchange in bureaucratic discourse
Introduction: information exchange as a focus of study
Bureaucrats seeking information and clients giving it
Interpreting information exchange in pragmatic terms
Reversing the roles: clients seeking information and institutions avoiding giving information
Conclusion: regulated information exchange and social control

4. Role behaviour in discourse
Introduction
Modes of talk and multiple role behaviour
Discourse roles
Shifting role relationships and the construction of social identities
Role perception in discourse
Conclusion

5. The client's perspective: clients as citizens
Introduction
Challenging the inhuman face of bureaucracy
Creating an edge over the institution
Talking to bureaucrats in order to maintain non-clienthood
Client's response to institutional failure: the case of lost mail
Conclusion

6. The bureaucrat's perspective: citizens as clients
Introduction
Alarming the client
Maintaining bureaucracy through official documents: forms and leaflets
Conclusion

7. The discourse of mediation: bureaucrats' dilemma and clients' wisdom
Introduction
Social workers attemting to redress the imbalance
Counselling institutions
Institutional monopolies over mediation
Conclusion: socio-economic struggles over multi-tier bureaucracy

8. Instead of a conclusion

Bibliography
Appendices
Index