The Bureaucratic Production of Difference: Ethos and Ethics in Migration Administrations

Abstract

What do they think they're doing?All the contributions to this book engage with this particular question. Following the intricate analyses of what bureaucrats do, 2 we now wish to consider what they think they're doing. While their answers might be inter-1 The research underlying this article was made possible by a generous fellowship at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Kolleg Konstanz. I would like to thank all those participating in the discussions of the bureaucracy group at the KuKo for the insights and inspiration I gained from our conversations, namely Arthur Benz, Pascale Cancik, Mirko Göpfert, Thomas Groß, Hans Christian Röhl, Christian Rosser and Marcus Twellmann. I would also like to thank Werner Schiffauer for many inspiring discussions about states and their knowledge practices. I am grateful to

“We have nothing to hide”: Legitimacy narratives, researcher positionality and the ethics of accessing the Dutch deportation apparatus

“…I argue that being granted access to institutions such as the DT&V might actually serve an important function for them. They rely on the writings of academics, as well as independently published journalistic reports and documentaries, to show their commitment to bureaucratic values of transparency and accountability (Eckert, 2020). Transparency practices and being “voluntarily accountable” (Karsten, 2015), as public administration scholarship shows, can have political consequences beyond the effects of making the information available.…”

“…It signals their commitment to values of transparency and accountability that are at the heart of the bureaucratic ethos. Going back to Weber, Eckert (2020, 11) explains that this ethos denotes “the assemblage of values that underpin procedures,” of which transparency and accountability are a vital part. As public administration scholarship shows, commitment to openness and transparency is likely to increase the perceived legitimacy of decision‐making, depending on the particular context (De Fine Licht et al, 2014; Roelofs, 2019, see also Armenta, 2018).…”

“…Considering these, I would argue that perhaps not all immigration agencies are best understood as “intentional, conspiratorial agencies bent on obscurity and secrecy” (Belcher & Martin, 2013, 403). I argue instead that the DT&V seeks to carry out general bureaucratic values of transparency and accountability (Eckert, 2020) but that while doing so, it produces a particular kind of knowledge about their organisational working practices. This does not mean, however, that caseworkers and strategic advisors provide an incomplete picture that hides “practices that even the state thinks are no good” (Vrăbiescu, 2019, 44).…”

The making of procedural justice: enacting the state and (non)citizenship

“…They do so by mobilizing additional insights from the rich body of ethnographic studies of statehood and bureaucrats' procedural practices that have underlined the inconsistences embedded in formal sectoral norms and reforms (Holm Vohnsen 2017) and illuminated the plurality of normative sources that bureaucratic work relies on (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2007;Andreetta 2019;Vetters 2019). Particular attention has been paid to discretion (Evans 2010), notions of deservingness (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2014;Lafleur and Mescoli 2018;De Coninck and Matthijs 2020), practical norms (Olivier de Sardan 2015), and bureaucratic ethos and ethics (Eckert 2020) as conceptual frameworks to describe how bureaucrats pragmatically process their tasks and make decisions in practice. Our contributions bring these frameworks into dialogue with the language of procedural law, procedural safeguards, and perceptions of procedural justice.…”

“For just decisions we need you!”: Relational decision‐making and the bureaucratic exclusion of “poor others”

“…Scholarship on bureaucratic decision‐making often focuses on specific actors and their internal processes (e.g., Hull, 2003; Miaz, 2017). Ethnographic approaches that unpack bureaucratic decision‐making reveal, however, that decisions are co‐produced by a vast web of actors from different fields (Forbess & James, 2018; Miaz & Achermann 2022; Vetters et al., 2022; Wissink 2021) and with specific ethical and procedural goals (Eckert, 2020; Ticktin, 2011). Against this background, we explore how decisions about the future stay of non‐citizens receiving social assistance come about in a relational interplay of different offices and actors in Switzerland, and how different values and goals (ethics) and the respective procedures (ethos) co‐produce the crafting of legitimate decisions.…”