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.