Qualitative Research in Action

Tim May

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761960683, 9780761960676
• eBook ISBN: 9781446232460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This exciting new book brings together contributions from world-leading scholars as well as younger researchers and focuses on cutting-edge issues related to the practice of qualitative research in the field. It provides a forum for contributors to discuss the issues and processes which inform qualitative research in its various forms as based on fieldwork experiences.

In achieving this in an accessible manner to both practicing students and researchers, it seeks to enable a dialogue over ideas and provide the reader with a "state of the art" overview of the topic from a contemporary perspective.

Rather than being a "how to do" book, this volume should prove vitally useful for advanced students and researchers who wish to engage with those ideas and practices in terms of their applicability for an understanding and explanation of the place of qualitative research in the social sciences. It is also a forum in which leading scholars make an original contribution to the subject.

Lively and highly readable throughout, Qualitative Research in Action will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and above in a variety of disciplines, as well as researchers who wish to engage with contemporary ideas and practices in relation to qualitative research.

PART 1

PUTTING THE PRACTICE INTO THEORY

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1	INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY
	Dorothy E. Smith

Note: in this introduction to institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, I make use of various concepts that organize that method. I have had in mind a hypertext procedure. When a concept is encountered that has a specialized use in this context, readers have the equivalent of a button to press to shift to a locale where they will find an account of how that concept is being used. In this case the equivalent of a button is a word in upper-case: ‘institutional ETHNOGRAPHY’ signals a concept provided with an explanation in an alphabetized list of such concepts at the end of the chapter.

The method of inquiry to be described in this chapter originates in the women’s movement of the 1970s in North America. I discovered then my double life of household/mothering and the university as a daily traverse across the line of fault between a woman’s life in the particularities of home and children and the impersonal, extra-local relations that the university sustains. Here, in these two work situations, were radically different modes of consciousness. The consciousness that organizes household work and childcare is highly attentive to the particularities of the local setting – the physical layout of the household, taking in the state of the floors, putting clean sheets on the beds, checking the refrigerator to see what’s there for supper, calling the kids in from play to get ready for school. It is a consciousness that coordinates multiple particular details, cues and initiatives, involving relationships with particularized others – children, partner, neighbours, and so on. The consciousness that organizes and is organized in the university setting and in relation to academic work is entirely different. It participates in a DISCOURSE in which particular others appear only as their printed names in texts, or positioned as members of definite classes of others – colleagues, students, supervisors, administrators and others. Here the subject participates in relations that extend beyond the local and particular, connecting her or him with others known and unknown in an impersonal organization, both of the university and of the extra-local relations of academic discourse. Particularized relationships emerge within institutionalized forms of coordination. The two modes of consciousness cannot coexist.

In the women’s movement of the 1970s I learned to take my experience as a woman as foundational to how I could know the world. From a standpoint in the everyday world, the objectified social relations of my work in the university came into view for me in a new way. I could see how the institutional order of which sociology was part was itself a production in and of people’s everyday activities, but that it connected people translocally across multiple local settings. The sociology I had been trained in was written almost exclusively by men from their viewpoint. The pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him’ were treated as the universal subject. The women’s movement in sociology was slowly learning how to recognize the extent to which the sociology in which we had learned to talk, write and teach and which claimed objectivity was deeply infected with assumptions that relied on excluding women and their concerns and experience from the discourse. Starting to rediscover the social from the standpoint in the everyday world of our experience was essential to a critique of the language of sociological discourse. In remaking sociology, feminists evolved a critique from that basis and also sought to remake the discipline to enable the experiential to be spoken with authority. My own work was part of this movement with the discourse (Smith 1974). I wanted to remake sociology from the ground up so that, rather than the object being to explain people’s social behaviour, the discipline could be turned upside down to become a sociology for women (Smith 1977), in which our EVERYDAY/EVERYNIGHT WORLDS would be rediscovered as they are organized by social relations not wholly visible within them. I called this ‘making the everyday world a sociological problematic’ (Smith 1979, 1987).

INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY

The sociology that has come out of that experience has come to be called ‘INSTITUTIONal ethnography’. In contrast to other sociologies, it does not take its problems or questions from one or other variant of sociological discourse – symbolic interaction, Marxism, ethnomethodology or other ‘school’ of sociological thinking and research. This doesn’t mean that it makes no use of such theories, but the central project is one of inquiry which begins with the issues and problems of people’s lives and develops inquiry from the standpoint of their experience in and of the actualities of their everyday living. It is not, however, confined to description of local social organization or to expressions of people’s own experiences. Though the latter are important, indeed essential, to institutional ethnography, the sociological project is one that takes up the everyday world as a problematic for investigation. Every local setting of people’s activity is permeated, organized by and contributes to social relations coordinating activities in multiple local sites. The work of the sociologist is to discover these relations and to map them so that people can begin to see how their own lives and work are hooked into the lives and work of others in relations of which most of us are not aware.

If we take the idea of being in people’s everyday/everynight worlds seriously, we run into the problem that we cannot grasp how they are put together from within them as they are experienced. Our directly known worlds are not self-contained or self-explicating despite the intimacy of our knowledge of them. The everyday/everynight of our contemporary living is organized by and coordinated with what people, mostly unknown and never to be known by us, are doing elsewhere and at different times. Institutional ethnography proposes to address this as its problematic. It takes up a stance in people’s experience in the local sites of their bodily being and seeks to discover what can’t be grasped from within that experience, namely the social relations that are implicit in its organization. The project calls on us as sociologists to discover just how the everyday/everynight worlds we participate in are being put together in people’s local activities, including, of course, our own. It conceives of the social as actually happening among people who are situated in particular places at particular times and not as ‘meaning’ or ‘norms’. It draws on people’s own good knowledge of their everyday/everynight worlds and does not substitute the expert’s ‘reality’ for what people know in the doing. The aim is to create a sociology for rather than of people.

Institutional ethnography’s radical move as a sociology is that of pulling the organization of the trans- or extra-local RULING RELATIONS (Smith 1999) – bureaucracy, the varieties of text-mediated discourse, the state, the professions, and so on – into the actual sites of people’s living where we have to find them as local and temporally situated activities. Concepts, beliefs, theory, ideology – the forms of thought in general – are integral to these forms of social organization and relations and are understood as critical to their local replication. An institutional language or ‘speech genre’ (Bakhtin 1986b) is itself a dimension of how a given institutional language is renewed and adapted as it is entered into and coordinates the subjectivities of people at work in particular local settings. Institutional ethnography refuses to accept the terms of such genres as constitutive of the objects of its exploration. Rather, as far as is practicable within a given scope of investigation, it locates the object or objects of its exploration in the actualities of the work/activity as it is coordinated, including the concepts, theories and so forth that are implicated in that coordination.

The double dialogue of sociological inquiry

Ethnography, writing about how people live, has a long history, originating in descriptions of how ‘others’, people not like ourselves, live. It has been deeply embedded in imperialism. In sociology today it is largely used to describe how others live who differ from ‘us’, sociological readers, and who are marginalized in some way in the society. It is this relationship that creates the ambiguities of the power relationships that Tracey Reynolds (Chapter 14 in this volume) analyses. On the one hand, if ethnographers are to properly describe a people’s ways of living, they have to understand the people, must become to some degree close to and be trusted by them; on the other ethnographers are committed to betraying these confidences to outsiders who may make of what is told whatever they want. Ethnographers’ descriptions represent them for others ‘objectively’ and ‘as they really are’. Description commits an invisible mediation. The describer is supposed to vanish in the act of writing so that somehow the original of what has been written will appear directly to the reader through the text. But as we know now, from the many critics of anthropological ethnography, this is not possible (see e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Abu-Lughod 1998). Indeed it looks as if the ethnographic act aimed at describing people’s ways of living is an oxymoron. The project is fundamentally contradictory.

Sociology is peculiar in that it aims at understanding the same world that sociologists are part of and do their sociological work in. Classically, sociology has sought devices that would enable its accounts of the social to pretend to stand outside it. However, it confronts a fundamental difficulty in sustaining this: sociological inquiry is necessarily engaged in a dialogic relationship with those it studies. Sociologists are in dialogue, direct or indirect, of some kind or another with others in the world they share with them. In dialogue with others we are captured, changed, come to see things differently. In the view put forward here, sociology, despite its claims to objectivity, can never achieve it. It can never insulate itself from the dynamic of an object that refuses to remain an object. Nor can sociologists simply segregate the sociological from the other-than-sociological dialogues they carry on. It is in the nature of their subject matter that they are exposed to capture by perspectives and ways of thinking other than the sociological. Disciplinary concepts and theories function to regulate sociological discourse and to guard it against this essential risk (Smith 1999), always imperfectly. Out of the primary dialogue with people who constitute both the resources for the accounts to be written and their ultimate users, we fashion a secondary dialogue within the order of sociological discourse, constrained by its conventions, methodologies, rules of evidence, discursive objects and other aspects of the ‘order of discourse’ (Foucault 1981).

Ethnographic work is explicitly a dialogue. Or rather two intersecting dialogues, one with those who are members of the settings to be described and the other with the discourse our description is to be read in. Dialogue number one is the ethnographer’s interviews with informants or observations of people’s everyday lives (observation is no less dialogic though the ethnographer doesn’t speak). Dialogue number two is the dialogue between ethnographers and their readers, the people they write for. Ethnographers write about their research in dialogue with the discourse in which their study originates. That discourse has already shaped the dialogue with the people whose lives they are describing in the choices of topics for their interviews or what they are attentive to in their observations. The issue of power lies in this intersection. The ethnographer’s power is to take what people have to say and to reassemble it to appear in quite a different setting in a different language and with interests and purposes that are not theirs.

Part of the problem I’ve described comes from the difficulties created by working up what is essentially dialogic into a monologic form (Bakhtin 1981), that is, by writing over or reinterpreting the various perspectives, experiences, ways of using language, of the primary dialogue into a single overriding version in which the differences, if they are registered at all, appear only as expressions or instances of the dominant discourse. The institutional ethnographic approach to the necessarily dialogic of any ethnography is one that recognizes and works with it. Its aim is not to describe how people live or the meanings they share (Emerson et al. 1995). It receives people’s accounts of their everyday life experiences as they tell them. They are the expert practitioners of their everyday worlds; they know how they go about doing things. The institutional ethnographer’s interest is in learning from them first and then beginning to locate in their accounts the junctures between the everyday worlds as they told them and how they are hooked into relations that connect them beyond scope of experience. The aim of the enterprise is to be able to return to those who are situated as were the interlocutors in the same institutionally ordered relationships, including, of course, those who directly participated, with something like a map of how the local settings of their work are organized into the relations that rule them. The project is analogous to cartography. It should produce accounts of the social relations and organization in which the doings of the people talked to are embedded that will enlarge individuals’ perspectives beyond what they can learn directly from their participation in the everyday/everynight world.

Finding the social

The social, the object of institutional ethnography’s attention, is conceived of as arising in people’s activities (what they do, say, write and so on) in particular local settings at particular times. Institutional ethnography’s people are always embodied. They are always somewhere at some time. The social is a focus on activities as they are coordinated, neither exclusively on the activities nor detaching the coordinating as ‘system’ or ‘structure’. The social is a focus on what is actually happening; it is to be discovered in people’s doings in the actual local settings of their lives. In emphasizing the concerting of people’s activities as its focus, institutional ethnography moves away, on the one hand, from concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1990) that reduce the social to properties of individuals or concepts such as social structure or system that reify the coordinative dimension of people’s activities.

This ontology of the social includes in a single ontological realm the standard dichotomy that lays practices on the one side and forms of consciousness, beliefs, ideology, concepts, theories, and so on, on the other. Language, concepts, thinking are here all recognized as among people’s activities. They occur in time and are done in the particular local settings of people’s bodily being. Thought and mind may be experienced as divorced from the local and from individuals’ bodily being, but the experience of separation from local actualities is itself produced right there in them as people adopt a disciplining of the body so familiar we pay no attention to it and as they take for granted the text as their medium of access to the beyond-the-local. Concepts and theories appear extra-temporal on the page but in actuality they are people’s doings in t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Transformation in Principles and Practice
• Part 1 Putting the Practice into Theory
• Part 2 Generalization, Interpretation and Analysis
• Part 3 Choices in Context
• Part 4 Power, Participation and Expertise
• Part 5 Reflexivity, the Self and Positioning
• Index