Becoming a street-level bureaucrat: aspects of discretion in asylum decision-making. An autoethnography of a caseworker in the Greek Asylum Service.

Abstract

Drawing on the theoretical concept of the streel-level bureaucrats and with the methodological vehicle of autoethnography, this thesis attempts to examine how asylum caseworkers perceive their role and exercise discretion in their everyday work through the refugee status determination process. For this purpose, I draw on my personal experience as an asylum caseworker in the Greek Asylum Service for four years, since 2015, on the mainland and the Greek islands, and observations in one of the most complicated and challenging bureaucratic services of the public administration, which began to operate in the same breath of the so-called “European refugee crisis”. The study offers insights into the dilemmas, challenges, uncertainties and conflicts inherent in the asylum decision-making process, and explores how caseworkers establish mechanisms to manage the above tensions that are produced in the realities of everyday practice.