Continuing personhood and the increasing bureaucratisation of death
My dad doesn't need electricity in heaven
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3218666 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kate Reed (0000-0003-0815-1973, University of Manchester), Anna Balazs (0000-0003-4436-6162, Södertörn University) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 74 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 160-175 |
| Publication date | 2024-11-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00380261241301578 |
| OpenAlex | W4404884380 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 39 |
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
Heaven · Personhood · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Philosophy
The Violence of Austerity
Health outcomes of bereavement
Desiring Bureaucracy
‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic
The Affect of the State
From Max Weber
Red Tape
The Bureaucratic Violence of the Health Care System for Pregnant Immigrants on the United States-Mexico Border
Academic constructions of bereavement
Thinking beyond rupture
Dying as a social relationship
Domains of Social Support That Predict Bereavement Distress Following Homicide Loss
Continuing Bonds in the Existential, Phenomenological, and Cultural Study of Grief
Is there a role for the funeral service provider in bereavement support within the context of compassionate communities
Emotional Responses to Bureaucratic Red Tape
"Funerals aren't nice but it couldn't have been nicer". The makings of a good funeral
Discipline and Punish
The Disciplinary Society
Funerals and families
Finland kills with a pen' - asylum seekers' protest against bureaucratic violence as politics of human rights
Death. So What? Sociology, Sequestration and Emancipation
Dead zones of the imagination
Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death
Knowing What You've Got Once It's Gone
Austerity as Bureaucratic Violence
Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of the Everyday
Disorder and disconnection
On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy
Hope For/Against the State
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |