The Good Decision-Maker or Protecting the System

This chapter explores how “digging deep”, which stands for the active “search for” inconsistencies in asylum seekers’ narratives in asylum interviews, becomes the morally correct thing for decision-makers to do. Building on Eckert (The Bureaucratic Production of Difference. transcript, Bielefeld, pp. 7–26, 2020) I challenge the depiction of bureaucracies as anethical and amoral. Ethics I understand not in a normative, but rather in an empirical sense, as the common good the administration is oriented towards. The chapter brings to light how particularly through fairness—both as a procedural norm and ethical value—digging deep is established as a routine, professionally necessary and desirable practice, which is connected to decision-makers’ role as “protectors of the system”. I argue that digging deep actively generates the “liars” and “false refugees” it sets out to “uncover”, thereby reinforcing the perception that, indeed, there “are” many false refugees which, again, strengthens the office’s and individual decision-makers’ endeavours to identify and exclude them from asylum.

Knowledge as Practice: Producing Decisional Certainty

Much uncertainty inheres in refugee status determination and particularly credibility assessments. This chapter deals with how asylum caseworkers attempt to overcome such uncertainties in order to reach enough decisional certainty for categorising asylum seekers into one of four legal categories: refugee with asylum, refugee with temporary admission, non-refugee with temporary admission and non-refugee without temporary admission. I argue that decision-makers’ explicit “country knowledge” as well as their implicit know-how of how to carry out their tasks and their “gut feeling”—which building on Reckwitz (Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32:4: 282–301, 2003) I conceptualise as professional-practical knowledge—plays a crucial role thereby. Furthermore, this chapter shows how basing negative asylum decisions on non-credibility rather than non-eligibility to refugee status serves as a means for overcoming uncertainties inherent in asylum decision-making, leading to the (re-)production of the so-called “culture of disbelief” in asylum administration.

Getting in Line with the Office

This chapter explores how asylum caseworkers are socialised on the job and thereby acquire an institutional habitus. Decision-makers are disciplined, incentivised, compelled, but also “ideationally conditioned” (Gill in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (2): 215–233, 2009) to think, act and feel in certain ways. The chapter argues that how organisational socialisation works can only be understood by taking three factors into account: what belonging to the office and to different “communities of interpretation” (Affolter, Miaz, and Poertner in Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 263–284, 2019; Wenger in Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based Approach. M.E. Sharp, Armonk, pp. 76–99, 2003) within the office means; how decision-makers acquire, and are taught, the necessary Dienstwissen (Weber in Economy and Society. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013 [1978]) for carrying out their tasks; and the accountability decision-makers feel towards other actors: peers and superiors, but also politicians, the media and “the public”. Together these aspects of organisational socialisation shape what decision-makers come to perceive as “normal” and “appropriate” practices. Through becoming members of the office, they develop a “socialised subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 61–215, 1992) which, in turn, shapes their everyday decision-making practices.

Shaping Administrative Practice: The Institutional Habitus

In order to understand how regularities in administrative practice are produced, the shaping of administrative caseworkers’ discretionary practices must be studied. This chapter adopts a holistic way of doing so, arguing that regulatory frameworks, the structural conditions of bureaucratic decision-making, the ideological environments administrations are embedded in as well as professional norms and values shape administrative caseworkers’ practices. Furthermore, the chapter argues that officials develop specific dispositions through organisational socialisation. For this purpose, building on Bourdieu, the concept of the institutional habitus is introduced. The chapter argues that the institutional habitus not only shapes everyday administrative practice but also reaffirms the very regulatory constraints, norms and values that lie at its heart. With regard to the empirical focus of this book—credibility assessments in asylum procedures—the concept of the institutional habitus allows us to analytically grasp the socialised subjectivity which emerges out of caseworkers’ socialisation in the office.

Asylum Decision-Making in Switzerland

This chapter provides an outline of how the Swiss asylum procedure works. It contextualises the current asylum procedure within the history of asylum politics in Switzerland since the 1950s and within broader global developments. Three major trends are discussed: the sharp decline of the recognition rate since the 1980s and with it the emergence of the so-called “fight against abuse”, the proliferation of legal categories and the frequent changes made to asylum law in this same time period, and the development of an ever more specialised asylum administration in Switzerland. The chapter introduces readers to the Swiss Secretariat for Migration (SEM) and its organisational structure as it existed until 2019, the main elements of asylum law that structure SEM officials’ decision-making and to the particular standard of proof in refugee status determination.

The Normalisation of Disbelief

The final chapter of this book highlights the importance of studying the shaping of practices of decision-making for understanding how administrations, law, policies and the state work. By bringing together the discussions of the different chapters of this book, it shows how different factors concur to produce the relatively stable outcomes of administrative practice that can be observed from the outside. These factors include the ideological environment administrations are embedded in, the professional norms and values at the heart of administrative work, the laws and policies caseworkers are in charge of “applying” and the structural conditions of administrative-legal decision-making as well as the dispositions caseworkers acquire through their socialisation on the job, and that are reproduced through their everyday practices. It shows how together these factors produce a regularity in asylum determination, namely that the majority of asylum claims are rejected on the basis of non-credibility. Disbelief becomes normalised.

Studying Everyday Practice(s) in the SEM

This chapter explores what it means to study a bureaucracy at work. It outlines my methodological approach for analysing everyday practices in the SEM, the challenges I encountered during fieldwork as well as the methodological limits of this study. Building on Reckwitz’s (European Journal of Social Theory 5: 243–263, 2002) definition of practice, I argue that methodological triangulation and particularly participant observation—mostly in the form of following administrative caseworkers around in their daily work—are crucial for analysing both the discursive and non-discursive aspects of practices. Yet, at the same time, following Hitchings (Area 44: 61–67, 2012), I challenge the claim made by some authors that discursive methods are methodologically unfitting for researching practices from a practice theoretical perspective. Rather, I argue that people’s retrospective descriptions of past events, their explicit knowledge of rules and norms and particularly their capacity to reflect on why they do what they do provide us with valuable insights into everyday practice.