Regular matters: credibility determination and the institutional habitus in a Swiss asylum office

Abstract

This article seeks to understand a common and regular feature of asylum decision-making, namely, that the majority of asylum claims are rejected, mostly on the basis of non-credibility. It draws on a bottom-up, qualitative study of an administration in which asylum decision-making takes place: the Swiss Secretariat for Migration. By adopting a practice-theoretical approach to administrative work, it advocates paying attention to caseworkers’ routinised, self-evident and largely unquestioned behaviours, not only in terms of what they do, but also of what they think, feel and know. Building on Bourdieu, it introduces the concept of institutional habitus, which refers to the dispositions caseworkers develop on the job. On the basis of a specific decision-making practice termed ‘digging deep’, the article shows how these dispositions are structured and how, through the practices institutional habitus generates, these ‘structuring structures’ are continuously reaffirmed, leading to the relatively stable outcomes of administrative decision-making that can be observed from the outside. The article argues against the assumption that regularities of administrative work should be understood as the outcome of strict rule-following, top-down orders and political instrumentalism. At the same time, it challenges the individualist quality sometimes ascribed to discretionary practices in street-level bureaucracy literature and in critiques of credibility assessment practices in asylum adjudication.

“Not everyday business.” A caseworker perspective on interpreter provision for deaf refugees and cooperation with interpreters

“…https://doi.org/10.7203/Just.3.27794 My discussion of this topic is based on the notion that translation and interpreting have always been shaped and impacted by intricate asymmetries and power inequalities (Carbonell i Cortés & Monzó-Nebot 2021, 1). The asylum system is one of those contexts where power asymmetries have become institutionalised and are also being perpetuated through the "inner beliefs" (Kobelinsky 2019) and "institutional habitus" (Affolter 2021) of the caseworkers, who hold considerable power over applicants in an overall situation of "geopolitical asymmetries imposed by global markets and the global politics of war" (Carbonell i Cortés & Monzó-Nebot 2021, 2). In their history of social work(ing), Chapman and Withers (2019) point to the "violent benevolence" and "interlocking oppressions" (8) that are often present in social work, where normative views deprive individuals of their agency and thus perpetuate systems of, for instance, racism, sexism, disablism, heterosexism, and so forth.…”

Bureaucratic configuration and discretion in asylum case processing: the case of the EUAA in Greece

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