Making Sense of Bureaucratic Information: Conceptualising Bureaucratic Translation

Using ethnographic material of new parents’ encounters with welfare workers during the process of claiming and receipt of universal family entitlements in Denmark and Romania, this article proposes the concept of bureaucratic translation. Drawing on Latourian conceptual foundations, we show that the communication of bureaucratic information is not only symbolically loaded, but invariably in need of ‘translation’. We highlight five interrelated processes of meaning-making parents have to engage in. Despite the universalism of entitlements, parents experience information offered by welfare workers as specialised knowledge that they should not legitimately be expected to have good command of. Their contestation stems from the tension between the helping ethos of universalist programmes and the inadequacies and insufficiencies of bureaucratic information offered. Bureaucratic translation illuminates the complexities of ‘learning costs’ underpinning administrative burden from citizens’ perspective, flagging difficulties even for the bureaucratically least challenging social programmes.