Continuing personhood and the increasing bureaucratisation of death: ‘My dad doesn’t need electricity in heaven’

Abstract

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.

Introduction

According to Eldridge and Reinke (2018) bureaucracies offer an ‘animated space’ that can produce unintended, sometimes violent outcomes. Although well-functioning bureaucratic systems that meet human need effectively are desirable (Jansen, 2014; Lea, 2021), most scholarship has tended to highlight the harmful impacts of existing bureaucratic organisations on individual subjectivities. Sociologists have sought to show how bureaucratic systems are frequently employed by the state to exercise control, domination and even violence over citizens, with detrimental effects (Bauman, 1989; Foucault, 1991; McGoey, 2007; O’Neill, 1986). While sociologists have explored the impact of bureaucratic force and control in a range of different areas of social life (from asylum seeking to education), less is known about the impact of bureaucracy in the context of death and dying.

When someone dies, a significant amount of ‘death administration’ must be completed by grieving relatives- from notifying officials to dealing with the estate. As the UK Commission on Bereavement (UKCB, 2022) has noted, bereaved individuals struggle with a range of time-consuming and time-sensitive bureaucratic tasks at a time when individuals are at their most vulnerable (Towers et al., 2023). Drawing on qualitative data from a study on death administration in the United Kingdom, this article shows how time-specific, contradictory and often insensitive bureaucratic processes can seriously affect the well-being of bereaved individuals. Death administration frequently suspends the dead in a liminal position between life and death (Jordan et al., 2015). This causes additional upset for bereaved individuals who remain caught in the jaws of bureaucracy, leaving them with little time to reflect on their loss or build an ongoing relationship (or continuing bond) with the deceased (Klass, 2023). By uncovering hidden bureaucratic processes in the UK, the article extends the focus of existing research on death, dying and bereavement. It also contributes new knowledge to sociological understandings of bureaucracy’s impact on individual experience.

In the article, we seek to illuminate the ways in which the scale and ultimate failure of bureaucratic processes (from cancelling accounts to dealing with probate) can compound the distress and vulnerability of bereaved individuals. Our analysis shows that the strong presence of bureaucracy in death administration operates as a form of bureaucratic violence. Bureaucratic violence is a specific type of domination in which citizen subjectivities are affected by rules and organisational structures (Norberg, 2022). Sociological research has tended to use the concept of bureaucratic violence to explain the experiences of already dispossessed groups (such as immigrants) in specific welfare contexts. For example, Heckert (2020) uses the concept to analyse how the bureaucratic aspects of health policies can generate harm for pregnant immigrant women in the US.

This article illustrates how death administration operates as a form of bureaucratic violence in the everyday experience of death and dying and in doing so offers a novel approach to researching death and dying. Although death administration in the UK can be linked to certain forms of welfare (for example, bereavement support payments) it is not specifically a welfare issue. By applying the concept in a new empirical area and illuminating the deeply ingrained and extensive reach of bureaucratic violence beyond welfare issues and traditional markers of social division, the paper significantly extends our use and understanding of the concept. In doing so the article offers a significant contribution to existing theories of bureaucracy and bureaucratisation.

We will begin in the following sections by outlining background literature along with the project’s conceptual focus and method before moving on to a discussion of the study findings presented in three sections: encountering bureaucracy in the face of bereavement, bureaucratic failure and its emotional effects and bureaucratic contradiction and continuing personhood.

Sociology of bereavement

The origins of sociology were firmly embedded in the Enlightenment project of modernity (Howarth & Leaman, 2002). According to Valentine (2006), the discipline’s focus on the promotion of societal progress and individual empowerment could not cope with the brutal fact of human mortality. The sequestration of experience is, however, also a core facet of modernity. With the advancement of modern society, therefore, death and dying has become increasingly privatised but also simultaneously medicalised and professionalised – both hidden from public view but also embedded in expert systems (healthcare, funeral services) (Mellor & Shilling, 1993; Walter, 2017; Willmott, 2000). As death and dying became increasingly personalised and individualised, the subject began to receive greater attention within sociology (Walter, 1993).

Social relations have become an increasingly important focus of sociological research on death and dying (Towers, 2023). The ‘continuing bonds’ thesis, based on the premise that relationships can survive the life–death boundary through an ongoing process of negotiation and meaning-making, has become the dominant discourse (Klass, 2023; Valentine, 2006). According to Kellehear (2008, p. 1540), social relationships can continue to evolve at the point of death and beyond, through memorial practices and other activities. As Ellis (2013) argues, the maintenance of bonds can enable relationships and self-identities to be sustained or redefined even ‘beyond’ death and physical existence.

While subjective experiences have often formed the central focus of sociological explorations of death and dying, different types of bereavement support have also received considerable attention in sociology and health studies in recent years. Existing research in these areas has tended to focus on evaluating different types of institutional support received by bereaved people after different types of bereavement (Bottomley et al., 2017; Gijzen et al., 2016; Simpson et al., 2021; Wainwright et al., 2020). While most of the existing scholarship focuses on grief and mental health support aimed at bereaved individuals, the practical challenges that emerge with the death of a loved one have been less well explored. There have been a small number of studies that have focused on examining some of the financial difficulties bereaved individuals can face after the death of a spouse or a family member (DiGiacomo et al., 2015; Woodthorpe & Rumble, 2016). Research has also examined the kinds of support available to bereaved individuals to assist with the organisation of funerals, including the role of funeral directors in the process (Aoun et al., 2019; Holloway et al., 2013; Rumbold et al., 2021). Other key aspects of death administration, such as acquiring the necessary documents, finalising the estate and inheritance, or informing state departments and companies about the death have received much less academic attention.

This article seeks to address this gap in the literature by exploring bereaved individuals’ experiences of different types of ‘death administration’. Drawing on interview data with bereaved individuals, the article will shed light on a whole range of administrative processes and examine the ways in which such administrative processes often add an additional layer of stress to individuals during a period already characterised by distress, grief and vulnerability (Stroebe et al., 2007).

Conceptualising bureaucratic violence

Studies in classical sociology offered descriptive accounts of the structure and working of bureaucracy (Weber, 2013a, 2013b). Recent scholarship has sought to address the impacts of increasing bureaucratisation on the subjective experiences of citizens, including the potentially violent nature of this impact (Mayblin et al., 2020; Näre, 2020; Norberg, 2022). Bureaucratic violence is a concept used to explore a hidden form of violence that is administered through ‘processes of decision-making, paperwork, knowledge production, inaction, and exclusion’ (Eldridge & Reinke, 2018, p. 95). Bureaucracies are composed of people making decisions and creating knowledge in various state or organisational structures that perpetuate violence on the public in myriad ways – physical, structural and symbolic (Eldridge & Reinke, 2018). According to Bauman (1989), bureaucratic violence comprises several key facets, including: the legitimation of organisational rules, invisibility of victims, depersonalisation of target groups and the removal of organisational improvisation and spontaneity. These facets combined mean that administrators in charge of bureaucratic processes remain unchallenged, regardless of the damage they may unwittingly inflict on service users (Norberg, 2022, p. 657).

The term bureaucratic violence, according to Heckert (2020), captures the ways in which bureaucracy can do the exclusionary work of law and public policy. She uses the concept to show how bureaucratic routes for gaining access to healthcare coverage create latent forms of exclusion and fear among pregnant Mexican women in the US. In her research on poverty in India Gupta (2012) goes further, by showing how bureaucratic procedures can lead to structural violence. She argues that bureaucratic processes can subvert the goals of social programmes and perpetuate inequalities that programmes claim to address, thus reinforcing structural violence.

Existing sociological discussions and applications of bureaucratic violence tend to focus on welfare issues. While much of this scholarship has been centred on an analysis of asylum seekers and refugees (Abdelhady et al., 2020; Mayblin et al., 2020), it has also been applied to other aspects of welfare in various contexts. For example, Norberg (2022) used the concept to examine the impact of austerity on disabled people’s access to welfare in Sweden. Regardless of the area of substantive application however, the concept has mostly been used to explore the experiences of disadvantaged or dispossessed individuals or groups. The operation of bureaucratic violence in these instances, therefore, serves to add additional barriers, reinforcing or extending experiences of powerlessness and vulnerability (Norberg, 2022).

In this article we propose that the strong presence of bureaucracy in death administration constitutes a form of bureaucratic violence – a bureaucratised form of violence that is neither ‘spectacular’ nor ‘instantaneous’ (Nixon, 2013, p. 2) but is one which is implemented in routine and mundane ways (Cooper & Whyte, 2017). This is because organisational norms across sectors tend to be followed at the cost of ethics and compassion, the target population (bereaved individuals) are depersonalised, their humanity is hidden behind bureaucratic complexity and failure (Bauman, 1989; Norberg, 2022). As administrative and emotional labour are transferred to the individual to reduce organisational costs (Lea, 2021), bereaved individuals are left to deal with impossible bureaucratic systems. Their engagement with such systems shapes their bereavement experience and contributes to their feelings of vulnerability.

Our article extends the use of the concept of bureaucratic violence in two key respects: firstly, in contrast to existing research we are applying the concept to a universal everyday experience. Experiences of death and bereavement can be negatively impacted by intersecting forms of structural inequalities (Woodthorpe & Rumble, 2016). They are not, however, just experienced by already dispossessed individuals or groups but happen to all of us regardless of our social, economic or cultural capital. Secondly, death administration is not specifically a welfare issue. It consists of the completion of a wide set of bureaucratic processes across private, public and third sector organisations – from arranging a funeral and managing the estate to disposing of material objects. It involves organisations and institutions (such as hospices) that we do not normally associate with violence (Graeber, 2012, 2015). Through examining the impact of bureaucratic violence on an individual’s ability to develop continuing bonds with the deceased, the article provides a highly novel application of the concept. Furthermore, by demonstrating the value of using the concept of bureaucratic violence in this everyday context we seek to highlight its relevance for studying wider social phenomena beyond specific welfare concerns.

Data collection and analysis

The material used in this article was collected for a study on death administration. The study was funded by UKRI Research England and received university ethical approval. The research took place online, using remote interviews and ethnographic material shared with us by the participants through email and social media. The research design was developed by the research team using insights from our partner organisation, the National Bereavement Service (NBS). The aim of the study was to understand the emotional and practical challenges bereaved people encounter while navigating administrative tasks related to the death of a loved one. We recruited participants who had experienced bereavement in the UK in the last five years and participated in the administrative tasks surrounding the death. Twelve participants had experienced bereavement very recently (between 0 and 2 years), and eight between 3 and 5 years. Regardless of the time lapse since bereavement, participants appeared to experience similar challenges in dealing with death administration. All participants are residents of the UK. While we were specifically interested in UK death administration processes, we included two participants who had lost a loved one outside the UK. This is because their accounts revealed aspects of the UK bereavement policy related to migrant communities and mental health services.

We took an inductive approach to the research, conducting in-depth interviews with the 20 individuals. Participants were recruited through two routes – a university volunteer research list and the professional networks of our partner organisation, the NBS. The age range of participants shows a broad variation (20–73 years), while their gender and class profile are less varied. The study included 17 female and three male participants; the significantly lower proportion of males could perhaps be traced back to gender-based differences in approaching difficult emotional situations like grief and bereavement, and the willingness to talk about such issues (Doka & Martin, 2011; Mayland et al., 2021). Despite attempting to recruit participants from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds our participants were mainly middle class (14 in senior professional roles, six in administrative roles) and ethnically white. Unfortunately, there were strict time-limits to the research funding we received for this project. This prevented us from pursuing additional recruitment strategies to widen and diversify the sample. We are unable in this article, therefore, to highlight differences in the experience of death administration according to issues of ethnicity, social class or gender. The fact that our respondents, with generally better access to means of self-advocacy and digital literacy, found death-related bureaucracy extremely challenging, however, suggests an even higher relevance of the problem among the more economically and socially vulnerable groups, thus identifying the pressing need for further research in this area.

The data were collected during the period of six months in 2022 by a sociologist and a social anthropologist. Both researchers are experienced in conducting research on sensitive topics including research on death, dying and bereavement. At the beginning of the interview, participants were reminded that they could opt out of any question they found difficult or upsetting. The researcher conducting the interviews closely monitored potential levels of participant distress during the conversation, offering breaks as needed. Using an interview guide developed in cooperation with NBS, we asked questions about the practical as well as the emotional aspects of bereavement. We also used a map of bereavement trajectories developed by the research team. This map represented the main steps of the death administration process in a one-page document and acted as a visual prompt for participants to help them construct their own bereavement narrative. At the end of the interview, we also invited each participant to share images and notes related to the experience if they wished to. Interviews were recorded and transcribed by a professional transcription service, then anonymised by the researchers.

Data were coded using NVivo software and analysed thematically. We took an inductive approach to our thematic analysis meaning that coding and theme development were directed by the content of the data. We began by reading and familiarising ourselves with the data, moving on to data coding, generating initial themes, reviewing those themes, defining and naming those themes and then writing up (Braun & Clarke, 2019). In the following findings sections, we focus on exploring three main issues identified in the data: initial encounters with bureaucracy and the tension between emotions and bureaucracy, bureaucratic failure and its effect on individual experience, and contradictions in bureaucracy and their impact on continuing bonds. Our analysis along these thematic axes revealed the significance of public and private bureaucratic structures as a key challenge in the administrative processes around death. Drawing on anonymised interview data, we seek to show the different ways our participants’ emotional experience of bereavement has been shaped by the various forms of bureaucracy they encountered after the death of a loved one.

Encountering bureaucracy in the face of bereavement

Existing research on the operation of bureaucratic violence has tended to emphasise the ways in which this form of harm affects members of vulnerable social groups in a disproportionate manner (Norberg, 2022). Although bereavement can be affected by various structural issues (such as poverty, refugee status, etc.) in an intersectional manner, it also constitutes a unique form of vulnerability because it is a universal phenomenon that affects everyone. While experiences are context specific and may relate to the type of loss, research tends to show that bereaved individuals are particularly vulnerable in the immediate aftermath of loss (Stroebe et al., 2007). At the same time, bereaved individuals are required to react in a precise and timely manner to address various complex and interrelated bureaucratic tasks – from arranging the funeral to closing bank accounts and managing the estate. In this section we seek to explore participant encounters with bureaucracy in the immediate aftermath of bereavement, drawing on data to illuminate some of the tension between emotion and bureaucracy.

Several participants in our study described the period immediately after their loss as a time when ‘one’s mind is in a whirl’ and thinking in a focused way seems impossible. The UK government Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has developed a system called ‘Tell Us Once’. This service enables individuals to report a death to most government departments at the same time to cancel a deceased person’s state pension, passport, driver’s licence, etc. Government bureaucracy, however, is only a small proportion of the bureaucracy that a bereaved individual must navigate. As Teresa, a 47-year-old woman who had lost her father to cancer five years ago articulated: ‘but there were so many other organisations to tell’ – from banks to utility companies. Teresa went on to discuss the tension she felt between experiencing the shock and sadness of loss whilst having to be organised to deal with different types of bureaucracy.

At a time when you’re reeling from that [death of a loved one], and you’re trying to come to terms with the fact that the world has just. . . it’s like you’ve been transported to a different reality, you’ve got to be the most organised you’re ever going to have to be. (Teresa, 47, administrative role)

Our findings show how bureaucratic systems, in most cases, do not recognise or address this kind of vulnerability. On the contrary, many organisations and their representatives often demonstrate a complete lack of compassion in dealing with bereaved individuals. The failure of organisations to act sensitively in this context, we argue, is an example of bureaucratic violence where bereaved people are forced to navigate impossible systems causing them significant distress. For example, several participants talked about receiving threatening letters regarding payments for bills that their deceased relative had failed to make. These threatening letters were frequently sent in organisational error but were particularly difficult for participants. Karen, a 59-year-old social worker whose husband died of cancer one year prior to our interview, discussed the effects of these instances. She complained that she was sent accusatory letters from the bank due to her husband’s outstanding credit card bill. According to Karen this ‘compounds that feeling of helplessness against something that you can’t control’. She found this especially distressing as it reminded her that her husband was no longer there to support her through the process.

Margaret, a 43-year-old researcher whose mother died five years ago because of a workplace accident also discussed the inflexibility and threatening communication from companies and state offices. She articulates how this aggravates an already difficult situation:

And you’d get letters, and it would be like, you need to pay this, you need to do that, we’re going to take the house off you, we’re going to do this and that. That really panics you and makes you feel terrible, on top of that you’ve lost your loved one. It’s not acceptable, and, you know, and then they make mistakes. So, like I got loads and loads of red letter demands, because they’d made a mistake, because they didn’t realise. (Margaret, 43, researcher)

The volume and speed at which administrative tasks must be completed after bereavement were especially troubling for participants. Several respondents felt that bureaucratic pressure prevented them from being able to process their grief properly. For example, Clara, a 54-year-old lecturer who lost her father to lung disease during the Covid pandemic, characterised dealing with the various aspects of death administration (from registering the death to organising the funeral) as ‘being on a conveyor belt’, explaining that she felt the bureaucratic requirements of different organisations (from hospitals to funeral directors) in the face of bereavement did not give her appropriate time and space to grieve and process the death.

Dealing with practical tasks after bereavement appeared to provide some of our participants with a helpful distraction from grief. In many cases, however, the volume of bureaucracy and speed at which it needs to be completed results in emotions being ‘bottled up’ and the grieving process being postponed or unfinished, constituting a potential mental health risk for the bereaved individual. One participant, Teresa, described how such temporal discrepancy affected her after the death of her father:

You’ve got two processes: you’ve got the administrative process; and then you’ve got the emotional process, which lags well behind. And it’s often not until all the admin stuff is done, then the emotions catch up and it hits you like a tsunami. (Teresa, 47, administrative role)

Another participant, Alison, a 42-year-old charity worker whose mother had died four years ago, talked about the exhausting nature of bureaucracy and the additional negative impact that this can have on top of feelings of grief: ‘And then I was off work for two and a half weeks, ill, ’cause I think everything just physically and mentally exhausted me’ (Alison, 42, charity worker).

These examples lead us to suggest that bureaucratic procedures in death administration constitute a form of bureaucratic violence (Cooper & Whyte, 2017; Nixon, 2013). As the findings presented here show, bereaved individuals are expected to deal with impossible bureaucratic processes that are often contradictory and inflexible. Their impersonal nature is at odds with notions of compassion, emotion and vulnerability (Hattke et al., 2020). Such time-specific, contradictory and insensitive processes can have a serious effect on the mental health and well-being of bereaved individuals. Although death administration may appear harmless, as with other forms of bureaucracy (Mayblin et al., 2020, p. 114) it can have very real mental and physical consequences. We will move on to explore this in more depth in the next section on bureaucratic failure.

Bureaucratic failure and its emotional effects

According to Graeber (2012), we are not used to thinking of organisations such as hospices or banks as violent institutions except in an abstract and metaphorical sense. The bureaucratic violence described in the previous section in relation to these kinds of organisations emerges because of multiple factors such as: human error, austerity measures and the structural setup of bureaucratic systems (Fisher, 2009; Graeber, 2012, 2015). Almost all our participants mentioned a set of recurring problems while dealing with death administration. This included lengthy waiting times on customer phone lines and in offices; confusing or missing information regarding bereavement-related protocols; problems being repeatedly raised by clients and ignored by authorities. Participants also felt that a lack of communication within different departments of the same organisation often caused extra work for bereaved individuals. This section will focus on exploring such bureaucratic failure in the context of death administration, examining its impact on individual experience.

In his study on Venezuelan migrants in Chile, Schrupp (2021) highlights the distressing impact that long waiting times can have on individuals who are attempting to navigate state bureaucratic processes. This was something which was echoed by our participants in the context of death administration, who tended to attribute such delays to staff shortages. Nora, for example, a 54-year-old researcher who lost her mother to cancer in the year prior to interview, referred to recent staff cuts in the UK civil service as a possible explanation of why she had to wait hours on the phone to access different government departments. This is even after she had accessed the government ‘Tell Us Once’ service:

The civil service cannot cope at the moment. If you’re spending an hour on the phone trying to get through to someone or two hours because you’ve gone through to the wrong person initially. [. . .] They [frontline civil servants] need proper training, because that is what has been most difficult, I think, is dealing with government departments, even after the Tell Us Once. (Nora 54, researcher)

Others talked about mistakes made by individuals working in public, private and third sector organisations, such as a doctor who had written the wrong date on the death certificate, or a funeral director who had made a mistake in the paperwork. Most participants felt that such mistakes were not a singular event connected to the fault of one individual. Such mistakes were a regular feature of death administration processes. This is illustrated by Karen, who needed her husband’s hospital bed removing from the family home after his death. It took several phone calls over two weeks to the palliative care centre until someone came to retrieve the bed. This caused Karen further emotional distress because she had to live with the painful material reminder of her husband’s death in her living room. The most upsetting part of this process for her was how mistakes such as this were treated by staff at the palliative care centre as part of the normal organisational routine rather than as something out of the ordinary:

For me the real shock was that everybody I have spoken to, each of the different nurses and their manager were saying, we’re glad you’re complaining about this, because this happens all the time. So, I was more angry to learn that this was just normal practice. If somebody had said, we’re really sorry, there was human error, I could have understood that better than being told, this happens all the time. (Karen, 54, social worker)

Mistakes like the one described above not only cause significant emotional distress to bereaved individuals, but they also transfer responsibility from organisations to individuals. As Lea (2021, p. 60) argues, by reassigning some of the administrative labour to the client, organisations reduce operative costs and, in the case of private companies, contribute to the growth of shareholder dividends. Other forms of ‘economic rationalisation’ affecting organisations include the downsizing of the workforce at managerial and customer-facing levels, and the outsourcing or restructuring of departments. Both measures have important consequences for client or customer experience. Our participants frequently spoke about feeling lost in a bureaucratic maze when their phone call does not go to the right department, or they could not find the correct form to complete. Diana, a 55-year-old senior financial advisor whose husband had died recently, articulates this:

You’re trying to move things on, but you are dependent on people who are invisible. Because you can’t go into branches anymore to get things done, you’re entirely down the line. And you wait for a long time for the phone calls to be answered, and then you get a different person every time, and the audit trails don’t work. As you speak to different people, they have different levels of access to accounts. (Diana, 55, senior financial advisor)

This again supports the argument that death administration is a form of bureaucratic violence. The bureaucracy that bereaved individuals are required to navigate is copious, complex, and impossible to complete. The inability to get things sorted caused our participants significant distress. This is illustrated by Clara, a 54-year-old researcher who lost her father one year prior to interview and could not manage to sort her dad’s utility bills out: ‘[T]hat was an absolute nightmare. That was part of the process which upset me the most and was really hard to deal with.’ Clara became so frustrated with her dad’s regional water board (with whom she struggled to close and settle his account) that she wrote to a national newspaper to complain. The newspaper published her letter and helped her to complete her utility administration.

Our interview data show how bureaucratic processes within death administration are fraught with error and failure. Such failures result not only from the nature of bureaucratic systems but also from structural problems, including inadequate funding and lack of professionally trained and accountable personnel. Administrative failure in this context should be viewed, therefore, as a form of bureaucratic violence because – as our interview extracts show – it clearly inflicts additional distress and disorientation among bereaved individuals, who are left to navigate broken and dysfunctional systems at a time when they are already distressed (Heckert, 2020). This compounds feelings of powerlessness and frustration among bereaved individuals, who, as we will argue in the following section, often struggle to move forward, and process their grief.

Bureaucratic contradictions: An impediment to continuing bonds?

Scholars writing on bureaucracy have frequently written about the contradictions inherent in bureaucratic processes. As Lea (2021, p. 61) argues ‘bureaucracy sucks the soul; bureaucracy is ethics in action. It stands in the way of freedom; it is freedom’s insurance.’ As accounts from our participants show, the death of a client often presents a specific anomaly for bureaucratic systems because it cannot be processed within the framework of standard regulations. In many cases, bureaucratic systems require the deceased person specifically to ‘act’ and do not allow for the bereaved relative to ‘act’ in their place. As we explore in this section, such contradictions are hugely problematic for bereaved individuals and can act as a form of bureaucratic violence. They often place the deceased person in a liminal space between life and death (Jordan et al., 2015), simultaneously denying and maintaining their personhood in ways that have significant emotional and practical impacts on bereaved individuals.

Most of our participants gave multiple examples of the contradictory nature of bureaucratic processes in relation to personhood. For example, Alison, a 42-year-old charity worker, told us about how the American multinational technology company Apple refused to close the iTunes account of her deceased mother because she still had some remaining credit left on it. They required the remaining credit to be spent before the account could be closed. It was impossible for Alison to address this issue because only her mum had access to the account.

And I remember having a really difficult conversation with Apple about the iTunes, and I phoned them up and I said, my mum’s died, I just want to know how to close her account. And they said, oh, you can’t do that, you can’t close it because there’s like £4 or something left on her balance, it needs to be a balance of zero before you can do it. So I said, well how do I get the balance off, and they said, well you need to buy something. And I said, well how do I buy something? And they said, well you just need to log in with her password and stuff and do it. And I said, but I don’t know her password, I can’t ask her. (Alison, 42, charity worker).

In another case, a bank refused to inform social worker Karen how much debt was on her late husband’s account, citing ‘data protection’ reasons. In the account below she articulates how bizarre this is:

They said, well, they couldn’t tell me that information because of data protection. So I’m saying, well, whose data are you protecting? George is dead so it really doesn’t matter. (Karen, 54, social worker)

Participants were also frequently asked to prove the death of a relative. Several of them discussed how this could be extremely upsetting, especially when they were asked repeatedly to talk about the death, or they encountered doubt on the side of authorities. Bereaved relatives often received letters from companies which were addressed to the deceased. This was after already informing institutions about the death, and could be particularly upsetting. For example, Clara, a 54-year-old university lecturer, talked about the difficulties of getting a final electricity bill for her deceased father’s home in order to settle the estate. The electricity company in question, however, refused to provide her with the bill or any information about whether it was in debit or credit. This is articulated in the quote below:

And the problem was ringing up all the time and actually explaining that my dad’s died. And I think, I remember shouting at somebody one day saying, well, my dad doesn’t need electricity in heaven. But again, having to prove he was dead, you know, are you sure? I was like, yeah, I’m sure my dad’s dead. You know, I’m not going to make it up. Yeah. It was just the fact of having to go over it again and again and again, explaining to somebody that my dad’s dead. (Clara, 54, lecturer)

Clara’s quote shows how the inflexibility of bureaucratic systems often results in a continuity of personhood beyond death. This is distinct from the benefits that scholars of death and dying highlight in the continuing bonds literature – which emphasises the ways in which personhood and self-identity can be maintained constructively through social relations across life and death (Ellis, 2013). In the context of bureaucracy, the deceased person is suspended in liminality in the impenetrable labyrinths of organisations. Rather than facilitating continuing bonds between the living and the dead, our data seem to show that this can impede their development. For example, Diana, a 55-year-old financial advisor, described how bureaucratic processes can negatively impact the relationship between living and dead:

And at the same time, what you’re doing is cancelling [the person]. . . contacting the utilities companies to get Joel, because he was on all of the utility companies, taken off, putting me on, having letters come to the house to the executor of the late Joel [full name], it’s hard, having to go through that transition, and again, all at a time when you feel utterly dreadful. (Diana, 55, senior financial advisor)

Bureaucratic processes appear to simultaneously prolong and cancel out personhood. By insisting that they will only deal with deceased individuals, organisations can inflict significant trauma on individuals who are continually reminded of their loss. At the same time, by trying to redirect these processes from deceased individuals to themselves, grieving individuals then feel the secondary upset of appearing to ‘cancel out’ their deceased relative. Data presented in this section therefore further illuminate the violence inherent in bureaucratic processes in the context of death administration. Impossible bureaucratic protocols permeate the grieving process in its entirety and prevent individuals from developing continuing bonds with their loved ones. This is because the deceased individual becomes suspended in bureaucratic processes (Kellehear, 2008; Valentine, 2006), between life and death (Jordan et al., 2015).

Discussion

This article has sought to offer an original contribution to sociology and to the social studies of death and dying in two ways: firstly, by using the concept of bureaucratic violence to examine the universal and everyday experience of death administration the article contributes new understandings to theories of bureaucracy and bureaucratisation. Secondly, it extends the focus of existing discussions on continuing bonds by exploring the ways in which death administration suspends the deceased individual in a liminal space between life and death, thus inhibiting the grieving process. In this discussion section we will reflect on the article’s contribution in these two areas.

The concept of bureaucratic violence has mostly been used by sociologists to explore the experiences of disadvantaged or dispossessed individuals or groups (such as migrants) in specific welfare contexts. We extend this conceptual focus by illuminating how the strong presence of bureaucracy in death administration constitutes a form of bureaucratic violence. Although bereavement can be affected by various structural issues in an intersectional manner, it also constitutes a unique form of vulnerability because it is a universal phenomenon that affects everyone. This vulnerability is compounded by bereaved individuals’ encounters with time-specific, contradictory and failing bureaucratic procedures. Such procedures are depersonalised, lacking in compassion and relying heavily on the legitimation of inner organisational rules (Bauman, 1989). Bureaucratic systems and organisations do not prioritise the well-being of bereaved people. Their failure to enact appropriate policy, we argue therefore, is an example of bureaucratic violence because bereaved people are forced to navigate impossible systems often with poor outcomes.

There are many similarities between the operation of bureaucratic violence in the context of death and bereavement and other areas of social life. Certainly, contributing factors behind the operation of bureaucratic violence in the context of death administration (such as economic rationalisation and downsizing, and inadequate staff training) inform the operation of bureaucratic violence in other areas of social life in the UK and in wider European contexts (Lea, 2021; Mayblin et al., 2020; Norberg, 2022). There are however also differences. Bereavement affects everyone, not just disadvantaged or dispossessed individuals or groups. Furthermore, death administration is not a specific welfare issue but involves cross-cutting bureaucracy across sectors and areas of social life. Some of the most distressing bureaucratic encounters experienced by our participants were not related to their engagements with the state but to charitable organisations (such as hospices) and telecommunications companies. Our article shows, therefore, the extensive damage that can be caused by bureaucratic violence beyond specific welfare concerns and traditional markers of social division. Death administration can have significant detrimental effects on bereaved individuals’ emotional well-being. This indicates a need for sociologists to update their framing of the concept, broadening it out to consider other universal and cross-cutting areas of social life and rethinking the damage bureaucratic violence can have beyond welfare concerns.

The social relations of death, dying and bereavement have become the central focus of sociological studies of death and dying. Advocates of the continuing bonds thesis show how relationships can survive the life–death boundary through memory-making and an ongoing process of negotiation (Ellis, 2013; Kellehear, 2008; Klass, 2023; Towers, 2023; Valentine, 2006). We have shown how bureaucratic processes simultaneously prolong and end personhood, suspending deceased individuals in a liminal space between life and death (Jordan et al., 2015). This shows the breadth of the impact of bureaucratic violence as it unfolds in this context. It illustrates how bureaucratic violence, when inflicted, can be incremental and accretive (Nixon, 2013), permeating the grieving process in its entirety and preventing individuals from developing continuing bonds with their loved ones (Kellehear, 2008; Valentine, 2006). This reinforces the value of extending the use of the concept of bureaucratic violence to substantive areas beyond welfare. It also emphasises the need for scholars of death and dying to extend their analyses of the continuing bonds thesis to consider the role that practical tasks and bureaucratic processes may play in hindering or facilitating ongoing social relationships with the deceased.

Conclusion

This article has examined the extensive nature of bureaucracy in death administration. We have used the concept of bureaucratic violence in this context to illustrate the everyday but often latent effects that bureaucracy can have in contemporary society. In doing so we have significantly extended the use of the concept beyond its current socio-theoretical moorings. By showcasing the wider applicability and value of bureaucratic violence as a socio-theoretical framework, the article offers a significant contribution to existing sociological debates on bureaucracy. In addition, by shedding light on the bureaucratic challenges people may face in the context of death administration this article provides further evidence of the need for change, prompting the creation of better functioning bureaucratic systems which attend more effectively to human need (Jansen, 2014; Lea, 2021).

While death administration affects everyone, the harm often caused by bureaucratic violence, as indicated by existing studies, can be particularly brutal for those lacking in specific forms of capital (Norberg, 2022). Given the limited nature of the sample on which this article is based, this was not something we were able to pursue in the context of this research. Our data do show, however, that educated people with higher self-advocacy skills struggle with death administration, thus indicating a potentially much larger problem for more disadvantaged groups of society. Future sociological analyses of death administration should therefore focus on the intersectional impact of inequality, exploring how certain disenfranchised groups might be worse affected by bureaucratic processes.