Publications

Select Publications and Research Projects:

Morality Within the State: Frontline Decision-Making in US Asylum Adjudications, Princeton University Press (under contract).
Morality Within the State explores how U.S. asylum officers navigate the moral and legal complexities of their work. Focusing on the post–Cold War period, the book examines how frontline decision-makers apply federal asylum policy while managing tensions between institutional and moral mandates, legal standards, and their own moral intuitions.
Drawing on in-depth interviews and rooted in the tradition of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980), the book conceptualizes asylum officers as moral problem-solvers. These officers often face moments of moral incongruence—when the demands of the job conflict with their sense of what is fair, just, or humane. Such moments require not only legal interpretation but also emotional and ethical labor.
I identify three recurring types of moral incongruence in asylum work, each reflecting a distinct moral challenge. The first, deserving but formally ineligible, arises when officers believe an applicant merits protection, but the case fails to meet legal criteria. The second, immoral policy and ruptured identification, describes moments of disillusionment, when institutional directives starkly conflict with officers’ internalized professional values. The third, automatization and the loss of meaningful work, captures how routinized processing can erode officers’ sense of purpose and emotional engagement. These categories offer a lens for understanding how frontline actors interpret their roles, respond to moral dilemmas, and sometimes subtly reshape the implementation of public policy. Rather than viewing morality as fixed, Morality Within the State shows how it is interpreted, negotiated, and enacted in context.
By tracing how officers perceive and respond to three recurring types of moral incongruence—classification mismatches, ruptures in professional identification, and the loss of meaningful engagement—Morality Within the State offers a framework that not only explains variation in bureaucratic behavior but also reveals the moral reasoning, emotional labor, and aspirational investments through which bureaucrats reshape both their work and their understanding of institutional purpose. This theoretical contribution enables a more granular analysis of frontline discretion and expands the conceptual toolkit for studying how morality operates within the state.

Shiff, Talia. 2025. “Shared Aspirations for Moral Realignment as Mechanisms of Moral Boundary Work in Times of Crisis: Asylum Decision-Making under Trump.” Manuscript Accepted, American Journal of Sociology.
The Trump administration’s sweeping changes to U.S. asylum policy created deep moral and professional conflict for many of the asylum officers tasked with enforcing them. In this article, I draw on interviews I conducted with officers who viewed these policies as fundamentally at odds with their professional service missions. I explore how they attempted to reconcile their actions with their values, effectively redrawing the moral boundaries of their professional community in the process. My findings show that the strategies officers used to manage this conflict were shaped by whether they were able to cultivate a shared sense of crisis—and a collective aspiration for moral realignment—with their peers. I develop a theoretical framework that emphasizes peer-to-peer interaction as a key mechanism of moral boundary work, helping workers navigate ruptures in organizational identification. By foregrounding this interpersonal dimension, my work contributes to broader conversations about how morality and organizational practice are actively negotiated in times of crisis and major policy transformation.

Talia Shiff. 2024. “Moral Logics of Bureaucratic Indifference.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 20, no. 1: 1-15.
In this article, I review scholarship that explores how morality shapes organizational practice on the frontlines of the state. I’m particularly interested in how bureaucrats—tasked with distributing rights, resources, and punishments on behalf of the state—draw on, contest, and apply moral frameworks in their day-to-day decisions. Much of this work focuses on moments when agency rules come into tension with personal moral values. In these situations, moral assumptions that usually remain in the background surface, becoming visible, debatable, and central to how bureaucrats make sense of their work. What motivates this review is my sense that current theorizing could benefit from greater attention to how frontline workers experience moral incongruence—those moments when their professional roles conflict with their moral intuitions. I argue that we need a closer look at the cognitive and affective processes through which these actors interpret such conflicts and attempt to realize their aspirations for moral resolution in practice.

Shiff, Talia, “Seeking Meaning in U.S. Asylum Adjudications: Aspirations, Affect, and Morality on the Frontlines of the State.” Revise and Resubmit at Social Forces.
In this article, I explore how U.S. asylum officers reclaim a sense of professional worth when their expectations of meaningful cognitive and emotional engagement with applicants collide with the reality of routinized, emotionally detached decision-making. Drawing on 43 in-depth interviews I conducted, I show how officers actively seek out aspects of asylum claims that spark intellectual interest or emotional resonance. I found that this investment allows officers to reinforce their self-image as morally engaged professionals—setting themselves apart from colleagues they see as disengaged. Over time, many reoriented their understanding of their role, framing their professional mission around intentional, emotionally responsive adjudication.
What struck me most was how officers came to treat this aspirational way of interacting as a kind of moral lens—granting greater worth to claims that moved them emotionally, often regardless of the applicant’s background or the formal legal merits of the case. Through this analysis, I aim to contribute to sociological understandings of how aspirations, affect, and morality intersect to shape the everyday practices of frontline workers.

Shiff, Talia. 2021. “A Sociology of Discordance: Negotiating Schemas of Worth and Codified Law in US Asylum Status Determinations,” American Journal of Sociology 127 no.2: 337-375.
– Recipient of 2022 of the Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article, Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association.

– Honorable Mention for the 2022 Sociology of Law Distinguished Article Award, American Sociological Association.

Asylum is one of the most urgent and politically charged global issues today. In this project, I explore how U.S. asylum officers make sense of their work and how their moral judgments intersect with legal rules in the decision-making process. Drawing on 30 interviews I conducted with asylum officers—alongside analysis of case law and policy documents—I developed a framework for understanding what happens when officers see a disconnect between who they believe deserves asylum and who is legally eligible. I’m particularly interested in how moments of tension between codified law and moral intuition shape how officers evaluate claims. This work contributes to cultural and organizational sociology by showing how moral schemas operate within legal institutions. It also offers insight into when and why decision-makers may rely on stereotypes or biases, with important implications for understanding how inequality is reproduced through bureaucratic processes.

Shiff, Talia. 2020. “Reconfiguring the Deserving Refugee: Cultural Categories of Worth and the Making of Refugee Policy.” Law & Society Review 54, no. 1: 102-132.
In this article, I examine how ideas about worth shape asylum law—especially in the absence of a clear policy framework for determining who qualifies for protection. Specifically, I explore how, during moments of policy upheaval, lawmakers bring moral distinctions to the forefront of lawmaking. Specifically, I show how they renegotiate the boundaries between “deserving” and “undeserving” refugees in order to give meaning to otherwise ambiguous legal standards.
In the U.S. case, I trace how lawmakers turned to the concept of immutability—the idea that a person must be persecuted for reasons they cannot control—in order to exclude Central Americans fleeing civil war and gang violence, while legitimizing claims made by women subjected to gender-based violence. By showing how categories of worth guide the formulation and application of asylum law during periods of instability, my work contributes to a deeper understanding of asylum policy and expands existing scholarship on the role of moral reasoning in institutional change.

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash