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Adequate information about the client's background, gathered through questions of a diagnostic nature, is crucial from a bureaucrat's viewpoint to decide whether or not the client's needs fall within the institutional criteria of eligibility. In this paper I analyse the two aspects of information exchange - information seeking and information giving - in the context of the social security system in the UK where clients of Asian origin come face-to-face with British bureaucrats to sort out their needs.
In analytic terms, I first focus on ‘categorisation' and `recontextualisation' as two processes of institutional decision-making and then raise issues of interculturality as it is embedded in institutional discourse. In light of the ‘(re)formulation' strategies employed by the participants to negotiate their role-relationships vis-a-vis the speech event they are in, I make an attempt to eassess Levinson's notion of `activity type' and the Gricean framework of ‘conversational maxims' in order to account for the intercultural dimension of the situated discourse. This leads me to examine the dilemma of the dominant participant: on the one hand the addressee-initiated demand to use 'linguistic simplification' strategies so as to formulate the client's needs and on the other hand, the privilege to employ a set of discourse strategies which are usually attributable to dominant participants in asymmetric communication contexts so as to safeguard the institutional rationale for services on offer.
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