Institutional Responsibility and Hidden Meanings

This article aims to show how bureaucratic discourses encode and construe the `complicity' and `reciprocal power relations' which theorists like Giddens and Bourdieu see as underpinning and maintaining institutional and hierarchical power. It will address the levels of increasing linguistic complexity and implicitness inherent in bureaucratic texts specifying workers' institutional tasks and responsibilities: job statements, duty descriptions and competency standards. It shows that the higher the institutional rank, the better workers are presumed to be informed about and the more they are expected to embody appropriate and implicit institutional knowledges and behaviours: the `hidden baggage of shared assumptions' increases as one moves up. The linguistic nature of this bureaucratic discourse reveals that its concern is not primarily to make statements spelling out divisions of labour, as much as realizing a hierarchy of degrees of institutional implicitness into which workers are to be acculturated.