Bureaucracy has been a core sociological concern since the discipline’s inception. While sociologists have explored the impact of bureaucracy on many areas of social life (from work to immigration policy), less is known about how bereaved individuals navigate the bureaucracy of death. After a loved one dies a range of time-consuming and time-sensitive hidden bureaucratic tasks must be completed – such as notifying officials and managing the estate – across public, private and third sector organisations. How do individuals experience and navigate such bureaucracy at a time of extreme sadness and vulnerability? Drawing on data from a qualitative study on death administration, this article explores people’s encounters with bureaucratic processes after bereavement. The article illuminates the challenging nature and ultimate failure of bureaucratic procedures in death administration. Such procedures create insensitivity around issues of personhood, often compounding emotional distress and vulnerability. Our analysis illuminates the ways in which this can lead to the operation of bureaucratic violence, a specific type of domination in which citizen subjectivities are affected by abstract rules and hostile organisational structures. By shedding light on death administration processes the article extends sociological understandings of bureaucracy and offers an innovative contribution to literature on grief.

中文翻译：

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持续的人格和死亡的日益官僚化：“我爸爸在天堂不需要电”


自该学科成立以来，官僚主义一直是社会学的核心问题。虽然社会学家已经探讨了官僚主义对社会生活许多领域（从工作到移民政策）的影响，但人们对失去亲人的个人如何在死亡的官僚主义中游刃有余知。亲人去世后，公共、私营和第三部门组织必须完成一系列耗时且时间敏感的隐藏官僚任务，例如通知官员和管理遗产。在极度悲伤和脆弱的时期，个人如何体验和驾驭这种官僚主义？本文借鉴了死亡管理的定性研究数据，探讨了人们在丧亲后遇到的官僚程序。这篇文章阐明了死亡管理中官僚程序的挑战性和最终失败。这样的程序造成了对人格问题的麻木不仁，往往会加剧情绪困扰和脆弱性。我们的分析阐明了这可能导致官僚暴力运作的方式，官僚暴力是一种特殊类型的统治，在这种统治中，公民的主体性受到抽象规则和敌对组织结构的影响。通过阐明死亡管理过程，本文扩展了对官僚主义的社会学理解，并为关于悲伤的文献做出了创新贡献。