This dissertation seeks to investigate how social policy is made and implemented where established scripts and institutionalized schemas do not align with complex subjects and cases: how do policymakers classify subjects and cases when they cannot default to established categories, what are the implications of engagement in forms of evaluation that are not amenable to routine processing, and how do administrative and justice systems under strain attempt to regulate these spaces of ambiguity? The dissertation examines these questions through the study of US asylum policy in the post-Cold War period. Using multiple sources of data, including archival policy documents, case law, media sources, interviews and administrative data on asylum decisions, and applying mixed methods (historical/documentary analysis, ethnography and quantitative analysis), it investigates how asylum officials make policy and implement rules when they cannot default to preestablished categories and patterns of classification, why frontline actors operating under time constraints and limited resources decide to devote extra time and resources to cases for which they cannot readily supply known characterization, and to what extent does the ambiguity inherent to classificatory regimes provide structural opportunities for change? This research contributes to existing asylum scholarship by examining two central, albeit largely overlooked, aspects of the asylum determination process: the role of embedded distinctions of worth in the formation of asylum policy during periods of policy upheaval, and the conditions that enable asylum officers to engage in moral deliberation, and to devote time and resources in order to assist applicants whom they perceive as worthy of asylum but whose experiences of harm do not squarely fit within agency standards for determining asylum eligibility. The contributions of this thesis are not limited to asylum. The thesis offers a new conceptual framework for identifying the conditions that lead to shifts in frontline actors’ disposition from rule-bound bureaucrats to moral deliberators, and links institutional and moral dimensions of decision-making to delineate the process through which embedded categories of worth influence implementation of policy when established patterns of practice are suspended, and agents can no longer rely on institutionalized policy scripts.

Last modified

• 10/14/2019

Creator

• Talia Shiff

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ffsp-ww73

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• evaluation
• Asylum
• institutionalism
• moral deliberation
• state theory
• decision-making

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright