Introduction

There is much more to late modernity than the comfort it has brought to our daily lives: this age of rapid and sometimes radical change in which we live has also rendered more complex the interactions between human beings. One example of this complexity is the bureaucratization of interpersonal relations, brought about by the expanding commercialization of services. Modern society all too often trivializes the contact between service providers and clients, and this has resulted in efforts to make direct contact between individuals and organizations more frequent. In past decades, high-quality relationships with customers were considered a key element of success in bureaucratic organizations (Dubar 2000: 113). Yet the focus on the customer has further problematized the question of communication in individual–organization interactions. The client's evaluation of the service is directly related to his/her expectations, which are invested with subjectivity. The success of the company's engagement in providing a service that will satisfy the client depends, therefore, on communication that favors a better reciprocal understanding and a shared sense of the actions of the participants (Zarifian 2001).

The focus of this chapter is on communication in a health insurance service. One relevant aspect of this communication is the negotiation of the sense of health and the contractual conditions that regulate the client/company relationship. In this context, the processes by which the participants construct their identity become crucial to mutual understanding and to the consequent validation of the service provided.