Agencies therefore unintentionally may encourage people to take on the profile of the problem case just so they can qualify for the services they need. They may become poorer, work less, engage in more deviant behavior, all in order to reach the threshold of qualifying for aid. They may even adopt risk vocabulary to explain their own plight in disempowering ways. As agency s cut back and restrict the definition to the neediest cases this problem may intensify. Then again when agencies loosen the definition more people may qualify and gain the stigma of being dependent on that agency or gain the stigma of being the kind of person served by that agency.
Clients learn to exercise bureaucratic competence and work the system to get what they can.
Clients unfortunately, as we discussed in class, may end up engaging in the self-fulfilling prophecy of secondary deviance in the process of exercising bureaucratic competence. Deviance, labeling, stigmatization, all may work in good part through how bureaucracy s process people. People with problems are turned into deviants who are labeled and stigmatized and once so identified come under expectations to act a certain deviant way . The people so labeled may capitulate if for no other reason that they recognize that this is how they can get what they need in the way of services. How much this happens is subject to intense debate.