Investigating Ruling Relations: Dynamics of Interviewing in Institutional Ethnography

Investigating Ruling Relations: Dynamics of Interviewing in Institutional Ethnography

Social researchers usually think of interviews as sources for learning about individual experience. In this chapter, however, we discuss interviewing as part of an alternative to conventional forms of interview research, in which investigators use informants' accounts to examine the “relations of ruling” that shape local experiences (Smith, 1996). The researcher and interviewee are conceived as exploring together the social relations in which both are situated, and the interview is conducted to produce something like a map (Smith, 2005) of institutional processes.

We use the term institutional ethnography, following the Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, to refer to investigation of the empirical linkages among local settings of everyday life, organizations, and translocal processes of administration and governance. These linkages constitute a complex field of coordination and control that Smith (1999) identifies as “the ruling relations;” these increasingly textual forms of coordination are “the forms in which power is generated and held in contemporary societies” (p. 79). Those who have followed Smith in developing institutional ethnography have investigated many different social processes and regimes of power, including the regulation of sexuality (Kinsman, 1996); the organization of health care (Rankin & Campbell, 2006), education (André-Bechely, 2005), and social work practice (De Montigny, 1995); the development of policies toward violence against women (Walker, 1990); employment and job training (Ng, 1996); welfare and workfare (Ridzi, 2009); international development regimes (Campbell & Teghtsoonian, 2010); relations of funding in the nonprofit sector (Nichols, 2008); environmental policy (Eastwood, 2005); and the organization of home and community life (Luken & Vaughan, 2005, 2006).

Over the past three decades, a loosely organized network of institutional ethnographers has emerged in North America and internationally.1 This chapter draws from the work of that network. In preparing the discussion that follows, we have examined published examples of institutional ethnographic research, interviewed practitioners (individually and in small groups), and collected accounts of research practices and reflections via e-mail. We understand institutional ethnography as an emergent mode of inquiry, always subject to revision and the improvisation required by new applications. Thus, we wish to emphasize that we do not intend any prescriptive orthodoxy. Rather, we hope to introduce this approach, provide practical information about it that is often unarticulated in published work, and highlight the distinctive practices associated with institutional ethnographic interviews.

In the following section, we provide an introduction to the various uses of interviewing in institutional ethnography projects. Next, we discuss the conduct and dynamics of interviews. The subsequent section foregrounds the key role of texts and institutional discourses in institutional ethnography, showing how interviews can be oriented toward these aspects of social organization and how that orientation may affect the interview process. Finally, we turn briefly to analysis and writing. For more detailed and extended discussions of institutional ethnography as a project of inquiry, with a focus on methods of research and analysis, see Smith (2005, 2006), Campbell and Gregor (2002), McCoy (2006, 2008), and Campbell (2010). For a longer version of this chapter, see Smith (2006).

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