Constructing Supplicants: Normative Control in State-Citizen Encounters

• In Event: Bureaucratic Politics and the Organizational State

Abstract

Existing research shows that everyday encounters between state and citizens produce compliant or disciplined subjects. However, this scholarship focuses primarily on outcomes, such as the subjects or normative ideals produced, leaving the underlying mechanisms underexplored. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a town-level petition office in China, this article conceptualizes these interactions as a form of normative control and identifies how it operates. I show that street-level bureaucrats deploy two mechanisms—moralizing demands and affective capture, seeking to mold petitioners from rights-bearing citizens into supplicants. First, bureaucrats seek to shift the vocabulary of demands-making from a rights-based register to a moral one, delegitimizing and displacing their demands while reframing their own concessions. Second, they build affective yet fictive relationships with petitioners and mobilize the moral obligations embedded in these relationships to elicit compliance. These mechanisms do not rely on one official ideology but draw flexibly on cultural scripts also shared by petitioners. Normative control is thus contested: petitioners also interpret, appropriate, and resist these efforts. By centering on mechanisms, this study contextualizes the state’s subject-shaping in organizational dynamics and explains how culture operates as a tool of control in state–citizen encounters.

Author

• Fengrui Tian, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor