"Rules you have to know"

As more universities internationalize, interest in engagement between international and domestic students has increased. University initiatives to bring students together often adopt a deficit approach dependent on international students’ “adjustment” to the host culture, overlooking the need for adjustment to be a two-way exchange and the role of the institution in this process. Focusing on educational group work as a salient site of cross-national interaction, this study draws on focus group data to explore how institutional habitus, or unwritten rules, are enacted at a large U.S. university. Findings indicated that domestic students were better socialized to understand the habitus of the institution and thus tend to take charge in group work. In contrast, international students were seen as linguistically and academically deficient and are relegated to passive roles in a group. Important implications for practitioners and scholars of U.S. higher education are discussed.

The vocational route to higher education in Finland: Students’ backgrounds, choices and study experiences

Division between academic and vocational education is a predominant feature of both upper secondary and higher education in Finland as well as in many other country contexts. This article focuses on a minority of higher education students, those who have not proceeded to higher education through the traditional academic track but have enrolled through the vocational route. We deploy the concept of institutional habitus and utilize Eurostudent VI survey data ( N=7318) to analyse the backgrounds and study experiences of higher education students with different kinds of educational backgrounds. Our findings indicate that those enrolling through the vocational route are more often mature students from lower parental educational backgrounds. They have often completed a longer study path and began to see themselves as future higher education students later in their life course. There are also differences in how students with diverse educational backgrounds experience their sense of belonging to the higher education community. This paper focuses on Finland but has relevance for other European countries as the institutional structures and practices discussed in this paper are evident internationally.

Stylistic pluralism and the experiences of classically trained teachers of singing in the Republic of Ireland

Throughout much of the 20th century, the Western classical vocal aesthetic dominated tertiary singing training in the Republic of Ireland. At the turn of the 21st century, and reflecting similar movements internationally, Irish institutions, examining boards and private teaching studios diversified to include musical theatre and popular styles of singing in degree programmes and syllabi. The purpose of this study was to further understand voice teacher perceptions of these shifts in pedagogical culture. This research questioned how classically trained teachers of singing negotiate teaching across styles in popular music genres, and also questioned if implicit, embodied cultural ideas about classical singing defined their educative approaches to popular music vocals. Data were collected through in-depth qualitative interviews with classically trained teachers of singing in the Republic of Ireland. Analysis of interview data revealed a number of themes which are discussed within a theoretical framework drawn from the work of Bourdieu, revealing that the participant teachers are involved in processes of negotiation and re-negotiation of personal and institutional habitus.

Regular matters: credibility determination and the institutional habitus in a Swiss asylum office

This article seeks to understand a common and regular feature of asylum decision-making, namely, that the majority of asylum claims are rejected, mostly on the basis of non-credibility. It draws on a bottom-up, qualitative study of an administration in which asylum decision-making takes place: the Swiss Secretariat for Migration. By adopting a practice-theoretical approach to administrative work, it advocates paying attention to caseworkers’ routinised, self-evident and largely unquestioned behaviours, not only in terms of what they do, but also of what they think, feel and know. Building on Bourdieu, it introduces the concept of institutional habitus, which refers to the dispositions caseworkers develop on the job. On the basis of a specific decision-making practice termed ‘digging deep’, the article shows how these dispositions are structured and how, through the practices institutional habitus generates, these ‘structuring structures’ are continuously reaffirmed, leading to the relatively stable outcomes of administrative decision-making that can be observed from the outside. The article argues against the assumption that regularities of administrative work should be understood as the outcome of strict rule-following, top-down orders and political instrumentalism. At the same time, it challenges the individualist quality sometimes ascribed to discretionary practices in street-level bureaucracy literature and in critiques of credibility assessment practices in asylum adjudication.

Rethinking Institutional Habitus in Education: A Relational Approach for Studying Its Sources and Impacts

Institutional habitus is a useful concept for analysing how schools adopt certain dispositions and influence students’ educational trajectories. The literature, however, reduces its source to collective social class mediated by an institution and only employs it to explain the reproduction of inequalities. Instead, I offer a relational framework that ties the concepts of institutional habitus, field and capital, and investigate how a secondary school improves the educational engagement of working-class, second-generation Turkish immigrant youth in Germany. The findings reveal that the school’s institutional habitus combines the communal values of the immigrant community and the middle-class academic practices; the former narrows the gap between home and school, and the latter modifies the classed feelings of students. The relational framework discloses that schools’ educational status in the educational field constitutes the source of institutional habitus, and that the institutional habitus can also explain the reduction of inequalities by schools.

Getting in Line with the Office

This chapter explores how asylum caseworkers are socialised on the job and thereby acquire an institutional habitus. Decision-makers are disciplined, incentivised, compelled, but also “ideationally conditioned” (Gill in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (2): 215–233, 2009) to think, act and feel in certain ways. The chapter argues that how organisational socialisation works can only be understood by taking three factors into account: what belonging to the office and to different “communities of interpretation” (Affolter, Miaz, and Poertner in Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 263–284, 2019; Wenger in Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based Approach. M.E. Sharp, Armonk, pp. 76–99, 2003) within the office means; how decision-makers acquire, and are taught, the necessary Dienstwissen (Weber in Economy and Society. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013 [1978]) for carrying out their tasks; and the accountability decision-makers feel towards other actors: peers and superiors, but also politicians, the media and “the public”. Together these aspects of organisational socialisation shape what decision-makers come to perceive as “normal” and “appropriate” practices. Through becoming members of the office, they develop a “socialised subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 61–215, 1992) which, in turn, shapes their everyday decision-making practices.

Shaping Administrative Practice: The Institutional Habitus

In 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.