CONFLATION OF INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL STEREOTYPING IN ASIAN MIGRANTS DISCOURSE

Younger Asian migrants-as interviewees and clients in the British inst itutional context-primarily view their confrontation with `white' gate keepers as one between their ethnic minority status and the cultural d ominance of the majority. By calling into play their migrant status mo re readily than their client status, they tend to interpret the perenn ial mismatch between their socioeconomic needs and the institutional p rocessing of those needs in terms of negative cultural stereotyping, a head of institutional stereotyping. My main focus in this paper is two fold: first, in order to explain why Asian migrants interpret institut ional actions as discriminatory devices against their ethnicity, I app eal to the broader sociohistorical context surrounding the migration p henomenon itself; second, I draw attention to the structure of their a ccounts of cultural discrimination-discursively realized as strategies of consensus and contrast-in the context of gatekeeping encounters. B y pointing out the limitations of an activity-based analysis of commun icative mismatches in client-gatekeeper discourse, I argue that in ord er to account for minority groups' discursive practices it is essentia l that we supplement the pragmatic analysis of mismatches with a socio -psychological analysis of 'self- and other-stereotyping' on the one h and and institutional and cultural stereotyping on the other hand.