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Thursday 31 March 2022 16:09

Abstract:
Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged.

The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes.

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Published by Cambridge University Press


About the author:

 Lisa Marie Borrelli holds a M.A. degree in European Studies and a M.A. in Media and Communication for Development from Malmö University in Sweden. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Sociology, Bern University, working within the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project 153225, in which she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with police and migration authorities in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden and has further collected data in Lithuania and Latvia. In her dissertation project she examined ambivalent laws and emotions of street-level bureaucrats working on irregular migration in the Schengen Area (Doc.Mobility Grant 172228), during which she was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Migration Law at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and visiting graduate student at the Centre for the Study of International Migration at UCLA. She now works as post-doctoral researcher within the NCCR-> on the move project ‚Governing Migration and Social Cohesion through Integration Requirements’, led by Christin Achermann and Stefanie Kurt.