The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography

Paul C. Luken, Suzanne Vaughan, Paul C. Luken, Suzanne Vaughan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030542221
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

A comprehensive guide to the alternative sociology originating in the work of Dorothy E. Smith, this Handbook not only explores the basic, founding principles of institutional ethnography (IE), but also captures current developments, approaches, and debates. Now widely known as a "sociology for people, " IE offers the tools to uncover the social relations shaping the everyday world in which we live and is utilized by scholars and social activists in sociology and beyond, including such fields as education, nursing, social work, linguistics, health and medical care, environmental studies, and other social-service related fields. Covering the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of IE, recent developments, and current areas of research and application that have yet to appear in the literature, The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography is suitable for both experienced practitioners of institutional ethnography and those who are exploring this approach for the first time.

© The Author(s) 2021

P. C. Luken, S. Vaughan (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnographyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Institutional Ethnography: Sociology for Today

Paul C. Luken¹

(1)

University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA

End Abstract

Over dinner at a meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association in 1996, Dorothy Smith mentioned that just before coming to the United States she read John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. I had never read it, but then, a budding institutional ethnographer, I was motivated to get the book. It was first published in 1930, and the preface describes a young man who is walking city streets at night. He is alone but very attentive to the people around him and his “muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs” (Dos Passos, 1960, p. v). At first he seems like an unemployed man who is struggling to survive during the Great Depression, but later we learn that he does not want a job. He wants all jobs and more: “One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough” (p. v), we are told, and we realize that it is the knowledge, not the work itself, that he is seeking, that he is listening for.

I have read this preface many times, in part because Dos Passos is a wonderful writer, but also because the wanderer reminds me of so many people who have come to study and practice institutional ethnography (IE). Many, myself included, were not satisfied with the sociology or women’s studies orientations that they learned in graduate school, and Smith’s feminist alternative sociology provided us with the direction that we needed. Others were drawn to institutional ethnography’s grounding in the everyday world with its commonplace and often hidden struggles. When we found institutional ethnography, we found what we were looking for.

I am also attracted to the preface of U.S.A. because of its final paragraph in which Dos Passos transitions from the man (small hero/ethnographer?) to a description of the United States:

U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills. U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people. (p. vi)

To borrow a phrase from the title of an old rhythm and blues song (Brown, 1966), “this is a man’s world” that Dos Passos sketches, although I am certain women appeared on the screens in the theaters and some may have placed their own annotations in the history books. Matters of interest to men dominated, and how that domination could occur and where it would be evident was in the speech of the people, in varieties of discourse. But what are the connections of speech, of language, to the endeavors that Dos Passos alludes to—business, economics, law, media, education, politics, labor, and war—and what are the consequences of these connections? That is the province of institutional ethnography.

Now, as I write this introduction, there is a new discourse that appears ubiquitous. You recognize the words and phrases—facemask, pandemic, shelter in place, self-quarantine, disinfectant, social distance, confirmed cases, wash your hands for 20 seconds, lockdown, ventilators, stay safe—as part of the vocabulary of the COVID-19 discourse. You altered many of the patterns of your everyday life—the people you see, the work that you do, how you forage for food, what you eat, how much you drink—as you and others are affected by this discourse, as you take it up in your actions. To the best of my knowledge I have not come into contact with the virus that causes COVID-19 (and I hope you have not either), but we have been unable to avoid the COVID-19 discourse. It extends beyond any particular speech acts or texts to all forms of communication. The discourse is not tied to any place or to any particular social institution. The language of COVID-19 is the new vernacular.

Many of the authors of the chapters in this handbook were still finishing their essays when the COVID-19 discourse became dominant in their lives. These authors are largely university faculty or advanced graduate students. Through emails I learned that some were having trouble finding opportunities to write because their children’s schools were closed and the kids were at home; they became engrossed in the work of childcare and homeschooling. Many were also changing their university courses from face-to-face to online formats, and for several this was their first foray into distance education. They were, in some instances, cut off from colleagues and the technology that their workplaces offered. Some, even when they had the time to write, said they found it difficult to concentrate and that frustration compounded the problem. As diverse as their experiences may be, I am confident there is something that they have in common. They know that we will need institutional ethnography to understand the social ramifications of the pandemic.

Purpose and Organization

Smith’s early books are collections of articles she produced while developing what came to be known as Institutional Ethnography. These articles, along with her instruction, provided the basic ideas that her students had to work with while producing their theses and dissertations at the University of British Columbia and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. The research projects became outstanding pieces of IE that were worked into publications in various forms. Since that time there has been considerable development of IE, and it is impossible to keep up with everything that is being produced. Nonetheless, significant research was undertaken in the 1980s because the core ideas had already been developed. For this reason, I highly recommend that students of IE return to Smith’s early collections: The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology; Text, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling; The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge; and Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. They contain all that one needs to engage in institutional ethnography.

As evidence of the value of these early writings, look to some of the books, chapters, and articles written by Smith’s students and other institutional ethnographers decades ago. In Campbell and Manicom’s 1995 collection Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations: Essays in the Social Organization of Knowledge you will find excellent institutional ethnography at a time when the link of Smith’s work to the field of the sociology of knowledge was clearly evident. Timothy Diamond’s landmark book Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care (1992) is an outstanding experience-based account of the regulation of the work done by both nursing assistants and the residents of nursing homes. George Smith’s groundbreaking article “Political Activist as Ethnographer” (1990) details how he used institutional ethnography while working as a political activist and how he used confrontation as a technique to discover ruling regimes work.

The chapters in this handbook are all original works and they are intended to extend rather than substitute for the existing institutional ethnography literature produced by Smith, her students, and other scholars over the past thirty years. The handbook serves as a comprehensive guide to the alternative sociology that began in Vancouver, Canada, as a “sociology for women” and grew into a “sociology for people” with global reach. Institutional ethnography provides the tools to discover the social relations shaping the everyday world in which we live; and it is widely utilized by scholars and social activists beyond sociology, in such fields as education, nursing, social work, linguistics, health and medical care, environmental studies, and other social service-related endeavors. Covering the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of institutional ethnography, along with recent developments, and current areas of research and application, this handbook is suitable for both experienced practitioners of institutional ethnography and those who are exploring this approach for the first time.

This handbook is divided into six parts and, while we hope readers find the arrangement useful, we recognize that the problems inherent in categorization are here as well. First there is the problem of overlap. Many of the chapters could easily fit into multiple sections. Second, nothing in institutional ethnography demands that we organize the materials as we have. We settled on the schema we did because we felt that it covers basic and enduring topics along with those that have arisen more recently. We also felt that this organization would be appropriate for novice as well as experienced institutional ethnographers. We hope that this plan works for you.

Part I: “Exploring Historical and Ontological Foundations.” These chapters provide readers with a basis in how institutional ethnography has developed, how its theory (of knowing) contrasts with other theories, and institutional ethnography’s use of theory. The chapters by Marj DeVault and Liza McCoy provide a basis for understanding the underlying premises of institutional ethnography and how they guide research, its conceptual development, and possibilities for extension to new areas. Eric Mykhalovskiy and graduate students explore the situation of institutional ethnography as alternative sociology, its relationship to theory and to other research approaches, to politics and to critique. Dorothy Smith’s chapter shows the value of the generalizing capacities of institutional language to institutional ethnographers as it is taken up in the process of defining actions as institutional.

Part II: “Developing Strategies and Exploring Challenges” continues the instructive mode elaborated in Smith’s Institutional Ethnography as Practice (2006) and Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnography (2014) with chapters describing challenges and opportunities encountered in the process of producing research studies—copyright issues, mapping and visual approaches, reflexivity, institutional capture, among others. Readers can learn about the challenges they might contend with in the course of a research project. The challenges of teaching institutional ethnography to undergraduates are also discussed.

The four chapters in Part III: “Explicating Global/Transnational Ruling Relations” examine issues from standpoints on different continents, yet the problematics connect with discourses established by national and multinational organizations connected through professional and governmental networks. This section illustrates the ways in which ruling operates transnationally. The chapters demonstrate how particular people are caught in extensive, global social relations. This section is valuable in showing institutional ethnography’s contribution to making visible how global ruling works and how remote ruling standpoints can be inserted into locally made decisions. The knowledge gained through these investigations can be used to critique aspects of global development.

Part IV: “Making Change within Communities” consists of three chapters that use institutional ethnography differently from one another in order to identify problems in their settings and to develop strategies designed to improve the existing textually-mediated social relations and, ultimately, the lives of people. For activist-oriented institutional ethnographers, they illustrate the value of a sociology that (1) begins in and remains in the everyday world and (2) is flexible enough to allow for innovation and adaptation to specific settings. Susan Turner and Julia Bomberry utilize collaborative mapping with a Haudenosaunee First Nations community in Canada to explore police investigations and services for Indigenous victims of sexual violence. Frank Ridzi develops maps of relations that establish and maintain unsafe housing conditions (lead-based paint). These are then used for advocacy and for philanthropic interventions that make a difference to the subjects in his research. Ellen Pence and Praxis International’s institutional analysis approach was designed to improve institutional responses to gender-based violence. The chapter describes how a team of community-based professionals can investigate work practices and policies and make systemic change in these areas.

The chapters in Part V: “Critiquing Public Sector Management Regimes” cover a w...