Institutional Ethnography

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Institutional ethnography is an important tool for understanding social organization and developing strategies for activism to effect social change. The goals of an institutional ethnography research project are overtly political, detailing how social injustices are organized with the aim of disrupting oppressive work processes. Integrating insights from Marxist materialism, feminist theory, politics, and activism, as well as ethnomethodology, an institutional ethnographic inquiry begins in people's experience and expands to larger social [Page 462]relations that, through textual coordination, form the relations of ruling, which include governments, corporations, the media, and academic discourses. The institution analyzed in institutional ethnography is not one organization but rather the work of several seemingly disconnected organizations that through their coordinated work form the ruling relations. Drawing on Marx's insight that all aspects of society, including concepts, are the result of human activity, a key tenet of institutional ethnography is that the ruling relations are traceable through the daily work practices of people. Interviewing and textual analysis are the most common research methods associated with an institutional ethnographic study, although other methods, such as participant observation and direct political involvement, have been used.

All institutional ethnographies begin with a disjuncture, the discrepancy between people's lived experience and ideological accounts of that same experience. Smith argued that traditional sociological research methods produce objectified accounts of reality in which people's actual experience is subsumed by established concepts. In the process of creating this objectified knowledge researchers transform the research participants into objects of study. To preserve the presence of the research participants as subjects, institutional ethnographers identify a problematic, a set of questions that orients the researcher to the lived experience, and a standpoint, an epistemological position and a portal into an analysis of how people's everyday experiences are shaped by larger social processes. Standpoint should be understood not as an identity but as a tool to investigate aspects of power relations that are normally obscured because they are normally framed from a ruling-class perspective. Approaching the research from the standpoint of marginalized people (e.g., those from racialized communities, immigrants, or indigenous peoples) reveals the work processes that result in exclusion and oppression. Standpoint focuses the researcher on how the institutional practices uncovered through the inquiry impact the individuals at the heart of the research project.

Because the goal of the inquiry is to expose how marginalization, brought into being through the actions of people, is socially organized, it is not necessary to conduct a large number of interviews. Each interview provides avenues of investigation that lead either to further interviews or to texts, such as policy documents. Institutional ethnographers conduct initial interviews with people who have lived the disjuncture to gather rich detail. As the disjuncture becomes more clearly articulated, it is necessary to interview people who have experience in administration, management, or policy development in order to understand how different institutions (educational, government, employers) and their institutional guidelines (policy, legislation) function to shape the experience of those experiencing the disjuncture. The purpose of these interviews is to gather information from persons beyond those who directly experience the disjuncture to discover how the disjuncture is socially organized in and by the ordinary daily work practices of people in different locations. Institutional ethnographers believe that all participants are experts about their work processes, and the focus in these interviews is on what the people do and how their actions are shaped by texts.

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