Do street-level bureaucrats have discretionary power? Analysing the immigration detention policy implementation from the perspective of organizational power struggles in Belgian ‘closed centres'

‘Discretionary power' suffers from conceptual ambiguity. Is it an attribute of individual street-level bureaucrats, or an organizational prerogative? If sociological approaches have deconstructed the legalistic donut analogy and explain discretion through a series of sociological variables, it is still unclear where the authorship of practices lies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Belgian immigration detention centres, in this article I advance a relational approach to discretionary power. I argue that to understand the practices of street-level bureaucrats, we must analyse the power relations in which they are embedded. Drawing on Crozier & Friedberg’s strategic analysis and Emirbayer and Johnsons’ theory of the organization-as-field, I look at how detention staff strategically mobilized different forms of capital to influence the decision-making processes. I argue that, rather than being discretionary, their practices and daily routines are the result of struggles over the control of organizational uncertainties, particularly the management of risks linked to detainees. Hence, their practices are neither organizational nor individual, but relational: they are shaped by and contribute to these relations of power. This dimension enables us to think of discretion beyond the individual-organizational dichotomy and questions the pertinence of the concept ‘discretion' to analyse migration policy implementation.