Publications

Select Publications and Research Projects:

Morality Within the State: Frontline Decision-Making in US Asylum Adjudications, Forthcoming with Princeton University Press.
Morality Within the State examines how frontline bureaucrats navigate moral dilemmas when implementing law. Drawing on seventy interviews with U.S. asylum officers, as well as policy documents, legal decisions, and agency materials, the book explores how officials charged with determining who deserves protection reconcile competing demands arising from law, professional norms, institutional mandates, and moral convictions. The book develops a new framework for understanding moral conflict in organizational life. It identifies three forms of moral incongruence that shape decision-making: the erosion of meaningful engagement through routinized work, tensions between legal classifications and moral judgments of deservingness, and conflicts between institutional directives and deeply held ethical commitments. While especially visible in asylum adjudication, these tensions also characterize work in healthcare, education, policing, and welfare administration.

Rather than treating morality as a diffuse background condition, Morality Within the State shows how different forms of moral conflict generate distinct patterns of interpretation and action. Asylum officers respond by reinterpreting legal categories, redefining professional identities, and renegotiating their relationship to the institutions they serve. In doing so, they do more than implement policy—they participate in the ongoing construction of legal categories, organizational practices, and institutional legitimacy. Bringing together insights from the sociology of morality, law and society, organizational sociology, and cultural sociology, the book offers a new account of how morality operates within bureaucracies and how frontline actors shape the state through their everyday work.

Shiff, Talia. 2026. “Seeking Meaning in U.S. Asylum Adjudications: Aspirations, Affect, and Morality on the Frontlines of the State.” 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. 2026. “Shared Aspirations for Moral Realignment as Mechanisms of Moral Boundary Work in Times of Crisis: Asylum Decision-Making under Trump.” American Journal of Sociology 131 (4): 1-39.
– Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Award, ASA 2026, Honorable Mention.

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. 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