Practices in Focus: The Dilemmas That Evoke them and the Effects They Have

Abstract

This study investigated a problem that can be expressed in two broad questions. Under what circumstances do decision makers work, and how can those circumstances be explained? How do officials deal with these circumstances, that is, the structural tensions, and how can their practices be explained? My approach to exploring these questions was a case study that was inspired by institutional ethnography and adopted the combined analytical lens of social practice, structuration and (post-)constructivist theories. Throughout the book, I aimed to show how these theoretical perspectives complement each other on the basis of empirical findings. In closing, this chapter focuses on officials' practices and offers concluding theoretical remarks in this regard.To understand the contextual factors of the case study, it was important to consider the external and internal circumstances of refugee status determination and how these circumstances interact. The international, supranational and national legal framework, asylum policies and jurisdiction of higher courts can be understood as an external environment that is, at least partly, already contradictory. Different orientations, such as human rights and restrictive policies, create conflicting logics in the field of asylum. However, the dilemmas are reinforced when we consider the internal circumstances of the FAO. The administration has its own organizational aims and is largely oriented toward the values of New Public Management -which was increasingly introduced in the Austrian context around the turn of the century -such as efficiency and outcome orientation. The mass processing of applications under limited resources creates the typical dilemmas of street-level bureaucracies. The findings illustrate that these circumstances produce the dilemmatic situation in which caseworkers find themselves when deciding asylum claims.The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi