Book notice: Immigration and Bureaucratic Control:

[Harold Schiffman]

Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Codó


Title: Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in
Public Administration
Series Title: Language, Power and Social Process [LPSP] 20
Published: 2008
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
                http://www.mouton-publishers.com

Book URL: http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110195897-1

Author: Eva Codó

Abstract:

This original study looks at language practices in a government agency
responsible for granting or denying legal status to transnational migrants
in Spain. Drawing on a unique corpus of naturally-occurring verbal
interactions between state officials and migrant petitioners as well as
ethnographic materials and interviews, it provides a fascinating insight
into the relationship between language, social heterogeneity, and practices
of exclusion.

The book investigates how a national agency with homogenizing views of
citizenship copes with the fundamental contradiction resulting from the
state's commitment to the values of pluralism, justice, and equality, and
its function as the regulator of access to socioeconomic resources. By
focusing on information provision, the book explores how much room there is
for individual agency in institutional contexts; and shows that what
happens in front-line talk has very little to do with allowing immigrants
access to crucial information but rather revolves around the regimentation
of language and behavior, and the enactment of social control. This
publication will be welcomed by students and researchers in the fields of
sociolinguistics, language and immigration, institutional talk, and
multilingualism.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-1402.html

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