Inside Asylum Bureaucracy

Julia Dahlviks open access monograph Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status Determination in Austria provides sociological insight into governmental action on the administration of asylum in the European context. By looking into processes that typically take place behind closed doors, it offers an in-depth understanding of how decision-making officials encounter and respond to structural contradictions in the asylum procedure produced by diverging legal, political, and administrative objectives. The focus is put on structural aspects, such as legal and organisational elements, as well as on aspects of agency, with an examination of the social practices and processes in the asylum administration. Coverage is based on a case study from Austria, a major receiving country for asylum applications throughout the recent past; the study is based on methods put forward by institutional ethnography, including qualitative interviews, participant observation, as well as artefact analysis, and is positioned within a broader context that allows for comparison within and beyond the European system. The book is divided into four parts: The first part, Claiming asylum in the 21st century: an institutional perspective, briefly explores the social, political and legal context in which the asylum procedure is located and explains the study design. Parts two, Setting the scene, and three, Performing the manoeuvre, go into detail by discussing the main empirical findings. First, the context and circumstances of work at the Federal Asylum Office are explored, followed by an analysis of the structural contradictions that characterize public officials day-to-day work. The discussion of the four identified dilemmas caseworkers deal with in everyday asylum bureaucracy represent the heart of the book. These are regulation versus room for manoeuvre, definiteness versus uncertainty, the human versus the faceless case, responsibility versus dissociation. The last part of the book, Conclusion and prospects, is concerned with theorizing public officials practices and practical ways ahead. Finally, the author argues that more attention needs to be paid to ethics in public administration, also in the context of international protection. Drawing on ethnographic literature on the anthropology of the state and organisational sociology, Julia Dahlvik offers an unprecedented view by combining different theoretical approaches to explain the empirical findings: public administration, street-level bureaucracy and organizational perspectives are complemented by considerations from the theories of social practice and structuration. This helps to contribute to the often missing theoretical development in this particular field of research. Overall, this book provides an important sociological contribution to research on a highly topical issue in today`s debate on immigration in Europe and beyond. It will appeal to researchers, policy makers, administrators, and other practitioners as well as students and readers interested in issues of immigration and asylum.

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