Part III Performing the Maneuver: Handling Four Dilemmas
6 Definitiveness vs. Uncertainty
6.3 Concluding Thoughts on Deciding in Uncertainty
According to Ortmann (2003:138, own translation), one difficulty in deciding is that
“we do not know enough; our capacity to process information is limited, and our preferences are unstable and inconsistent.” The situation of never knowing enough is of particular importance in processing asylum claims. Caseworkers are constantly searching for information; they arrange research and expert assessments in order to make conclusions regarding the credibility of the asylum claimant’s assertions.
However, a decision-making official can ultimately never know enough and can hardly know every detail of the “true” concatenation of circumstances and contexts that led to the flight or fully evaluate and anticipate a possible future risk of persecu-tion. The investigation of officials’ practices is of particular interest in such “crises,”
that is, in situations that cannot be mastered by means of routinized patterns.
Following Reckwitz (2005:255), “the ‘breaking’ and ‘shifting’ of social structures takes place in everyday crises of routines, in constellations of interpretive indeter-minacy and of the inadequacy of knowledge with which the agent, carrying out a practice, is confronted in the face of a ‘situation.’” Although officials are constantly confronted by the undecidability of asylum claims, each situation requires a new strategy of dealing with that uncertainty.
Following Ortmann, deciding means the transformation of contingency into unambiguity. “What to do when the necessary transformation of contingency – the decision – is not doubtlessly substantiated in itself – and it is almost never? Then, doubts have to be suppressed, weak justifications have to become strong ones, miss-ing ones have to become feigned ones” (Ortmann 1990:375). In the legitimation and justification of a decision regarding an asylum claim, these suppression and consoli-dation mechanisms play a crucial role, highlighting the constructed character of facts. Such a decision is rarely “doubtlessly substantiated in itself,” and missing or weak argumentation is strengthened through information from authorized sources such as the COI Unit or expert reports. These legitimate sources play a vital part in the construction and definition of a “fact.” These mechanisms of suppression and consolidation are related to the decision makers’ practices of ascertaining facts while being oriented toward norms. Caseworkers investigate only those facts that are norm-relevant and allow a decision that fits the “program” (Lautmann 2011:168).
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The construction of facts departs from the assumption that objectification is pos-sible. As Rousseau and Foxen (2006:515) note,
The interpretation of the refugee’s story in terms of conformity and deviance relies on expert (institutional) knowledge and on an expert experience that must appear to be founded on an objectification of truth and falsehood and that therefore assumes, from the outset, that such objectification is possible.
Data provided by tools such as databases are often perceived as “‘hard’ data, duly filtered and authoritatively approved, and somehow representing ‘objective’
information,” an impression that might be reinforced by the technological presenta-tion of data (Noll 2005:145). However, any such informapresenta-tion depends on the author’s judgment and might thus be as subjective as a claimant’s account. In this
“game” of interpretation, definition and legitimation, organizations and their mem-bers are powerful players. As memmem-bers of the organization, certain groups of actors – often, the decision makers – have the power to define “right” and “wrong”
(Ortmann 2010:191). These issues emphasize the power asymmetry between the individual claimant and the caseworker as a member of the organization. Being such a member also means being socialized in the organization and adopting certain views, values and practices, such as practices of dealing with uncertainty.
Categorization, one way of dealing with ambiguous situations, will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. This chapter illustrated how information is made valid and legitimate in a context through the construction of facts, artifacts and (in)credibility. It also became evident that the different practices of officials’
“construction work” are closely intertwined.
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© The Author(s) 2018
J. Dahlvik, Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status Determination in Austria, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63306-0_7
Chapter 7
The Human Individual vs.
the Faceless Case
Another structural contradiction inherent in the asylum procedure is the conflict between a focus on the asylum claimant as a human being and a faceless case. This chapter examines how officials try – or do not try – to reconcile these. I explore what shapes their practices and how these practices shape the interaction with claimants.
In his treatise on bureaucracy, Weber (1978:959) argues that the ideal public servant is to be “devoted to impersonal and functional purposes.” While the admin-istrative processing of large numbers of applications provokes impersonality, at the same time, the asylum procedure and the asylum interview in particular need to focus on the individual claimant. The interview situation seems to be the only time and place where claimants are perceived and recognized as individuals. Throughout the procedure, asylum claimants are otherwise constructed as abstract cases and productivity-related numbers in the sense of New Public Management. Examining the situation from the perspective of Parsons’ (1951) orientation alternatives, case-workers find themselves in a dilemma between universalism and particularism. On the one hand, deciding upon an asylum claim requires that officials follow general principles; on the other hand, they have to consider the particular case. While the law requires that every asylum claimant be treated on an equal basis, officials also have to attend to the claimant’s specific situation. In addition, the dilemma is related to a choice between an orientation at neutrality or affectivity (Parsons 1951);
whereas some roles and situations require emotional commitment and action moti-vated by feelings, others demand functional, sober behavior. In this context, Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000:329) identify two coexisting narratives of discretion among officials: on the one hand, they are “state agents who act in response to rules, procedures, and law”; on the other hand, they are “citizen agents who act in response to individuals and circumstances.” The latter, caseworkers’
practices of “dealing with faces,” has often been muted in street-level bureaucracy
The original version of this chapter was revised.
An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63306-0_12
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research thus far (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). In a similar Dubois (2010) argues that most dilemmas “alternate between involvement and detachment, assistance and domination.” Officials’ practices with regard to these structural ten-sions will be explored in this and the following related chapter on responsibility versus dissociation.
7.1 The Face in Face-to-Face Interaction: A “Human Aspect” vs. Organizational Aims
As a face-to-face interaction, the asylum interview is characterized by the visibility and presence of the claimant as an individual. It seems to be the only situation in which caseworkers see their “clients” as “faces” instead of abstract cases or num-bers. In this bureaucratic encounter, where the official (usually) leaves her desk and performs “front line” work (Lipsky 2010), the appearance and performance of the claimant (and all other involved actors) gains importance. As explored above, offi-cials tend to pay attention to claimants’ behavior and ways of talking, and their impressions influence the decision-making process.
The individual and her experiences are the focus, particularly when claimants call intersubjectivity into question. Referring to the idea that an official is not only an organ of the authority but also a human being, claimants may appeal to the offi-cial’s empathy for and understanding of their situation. Examples include the ques-tions mentioned in Sect. 4.2 toward one caseworker, asking whether she had ever been raped or had ever experienced a war. In one of the observed interviews, the claimant directs the latter question to the caseworker “from human to human” (o.i.
6). Instead of addressing the interviewer in her official role, embodying state author-ity, the claimant alludes to the human level, asking her, as an individual, a personal question. However, the official notes that one can also have understanding without having the experience. While the caseworker reflects critically upon her position, regarding herself as an “inhabitant of the island of bliss” (Sabine) and being aware that she does not have certain experiences, she finds that her investigation possibili-ties compensate this lack of intersubjectivity.
I mean, of course one also has to think in the people’s shoes … For us, it’s also difficult, I’d say. We live here, yes, we have no idea, let’s be honest, what’s happening in another coun-try. Now, we as inhabitants of the island of bliss, if I may say so, decide upon someone who comes from a country where there’s really no security, no legal system, no security police, functioning police, right? But how can we know that if we’ve never been there, right? And one [claimant] criticized me for that; I don’t have a clue what I’m actually talking about, right? It’s true, but for that, we do have our research (Sabine).
The official also believes that “if you have a family at home yourself, you maybe also think differently than if you are a single, and a male single.” She explains that when she started working at the FAO in what is now the IRC, she “always had toys for the children in the interview rooms” and provided snacks for the children, thereby creating a more relaxed interview situation not only for the children but also for the parents. Her statement also implies that there is a gender difference in