Introduction: What is Institutional Ethnography?

“Institutional ethnography” is the label that has come to be used for an approach to investigation of the social that focuses on “textually-mediated social organization” (Smith 1990b). Developed and named by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1987) in the early 1980s, institutional ethnography has matured over the past several decades and spread not only internationally in sociology but through a number of other fields such as nursing, education, social work, planning, and so on. The practice of institutional ethnography has developed incrementally; Smith’s first writing provided a sketch for the approach, but she always insisted that it was a method that researchers would build collaboratively, working out how to proceed as we go along. Those using the approach have been sharing work through informal meetings and networking, elaborating and specifying the outlines of institutional ethnography, and developing the approach in working with students (DeVault and McCoy 2002; and, for a useful teaching text, Campbell and Gregor 2002). Recently, Smith herself has produced a pair of books that elaborate and illustrate her vision of this “alternative sociology” (Smith 2005, forthcoming). Institutional ethnographies are built from the examination of work processes and study of how they are coordinated, typically through texts and discourses of various sorts. Work activities are taken as the fundamental grounding of social life, and an institutional ethnography generally takes some particular experience (and associated work processes) as a “point of entry.” The work involved could be part of a paid job; it might fall into the broader field of unpaid or invisible work, as so much of women’s work does; or it might comprise the activities of some “client” group. In any case, there is recognition that institutional ideologies typically acknowledge some kinds of work and not others. Thus, the investigator attends to all of the work that’s done in the setting, and also notes which activities are recognized and accounted institutionally and which are not. Analysis proceeds by way of tracing the social relations people are drawn into through their work (with the term “social relations” taken in its Marxist sense to mean not relationships but connections among work processes). The point is to show how people in one place are aligning their activities with relevances produced elsewhere, in order to illuminate the forces that shape experience at the point of entry. Many institutional ethnographers have adopted a rhetoric of “mapping” to highlight the analytic goal of explication rather than theory building; the analysis is meant to be “usable” in the way that a map can be used to find one’s way. Institutional ethnography’s focus on texts comes from an empirical observation—that technologies of social control are increasingly and pervasively textual and discursive (Smith 1999). Texts such as medical charts, enrollment reports, strategic plans, and so on are mechanisms for coordinating activity across many different sites. Social science is sometimes a part of this coordinative apparatus, and perhaps as a result, we've tended to take this kind of textual coordination for granted, too often looking “through” texts without noticing their power or