Frontmatter; Contents; Chapter 1 Immigration, bureaucracy and language; Chapter 2 Service activities and bureaucratic procedure; Chapter 3 An illusion of information; Chapter 4 Strategies of information management; Chapter 5 The scrutinisation of behaviour; Chapter 6 Language choice and multilingual practice; Backmatter
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 c
