Shaping Administrative Practice: The Institutional Habitus

Abstract

AbstractIn order to understand how regularities in administrative practice are produced, the shaping of administrative caseworkers’ discretionary practices must be studied. This chapter adopts a holistic way of doing so, arguing that regulatory frameworks, the structural conditions of bureaucratic decision-making, the ideological environments administrations are embedded in as well as professional norms and values shape administrative caseworkers’ practices. Furthermore, the chapter argues that officials develop specific dispositions through organisational socialisation. For this purpose, building on Bourdieu, the concept of the institutional habitus is introduced. The chapter argues that the institutional habitus not only shapes everyday administrative practice but also reaffirms the very regulatory constraints, norms and values that lie at its heart. With regard to the empirical focus of this book—credibility assessments in asylum procedures—the concept of the institutional habitus allows us to analytically grasp the socialised subjectivity which emerges out of caseworkers’ socialisation in the office.