Organizing knowledge in an asylum office

This paper draws on my institutional ethnography (IE) study investigating administrative work as practice and is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with decision making officials of a branch of the Austrian Federal Asylum Office. A vital part of the organization of knowledge in this work context lies in the (re-)production of categories and ‘facts’ (legalfacts) – thus making administrative work more efficient and cases easier to handle by establishing routines and reducing complexity. The processes of categorization, objectivation and ‘factization’ are informed by knowledge from various sources, i.a. information, ‘facts’ and ideology. In this paper I take a look at how these processes – the institutional organization of knowledge and the ideologies involved in the construction of categories and facts – operate in the concerned state agency and shape officials’ everyday practices of work. The arguments developed illustrate how ideology informed by formal training as well as informal socialization in the state institution is incorporated in street-level bureaucrats’ practices of fact finding and decision-making, but also in their relations to their ‘clients’, the asylum claimants, e.g. in their practices of interviewing. These questions are of particular interest since officials’ practices of decision-making produce important consequences for asylum claimants’ future lives.