Institutional Ethnography

Encountering Actualities

Institutional ethnography inquires, investigates, examines, and observes; it does not impose sociologically authorized interpretations. The institutional ethnographer learns by encountering the actualities through observing or talking with those who are directly involved. But what does she or he encounter? There are two problems:

• One problem is that there is a wild and woolly world out there that can never be tied down to any particular deployment of language (or other medium of representation). It is always more and other. So what should ethnography bring into focus?
• A second problem is that of the ontology of the social. In other words, how does it exist out there so that we can learn from it rather than imposing our pregiven interpretations?

Institutional ethnography starts, as did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with actual people, their work, and the conditions of their work. It adds something that is implicit but not stated—how their work is coordinated. That is the focus. That is how the social is identified. Actions or work are not just seen as done by individuals; rather, they are always seen under the aspect of how they are coordinated with the actions or work of others.

Language

Speech, writing, images, and so on are recognized as among people's activities—their doings or work. Sociology in general proceeds with what Dorothy Smith calls a dual ontology that differentiates activities from what goes on in individuals’ “heads”—mind, belief, ideology, theory, culture, and the like. The latter are treated as occupying a different realm from that of action. How they may affect or influence people's behavior then becomes an issue. That dual ontology is rejected by institutional ethnography. Language is action. Institutional ethnography takes up phenomena of language as central to the coordinating of people's subjectivities. This does not mean reducing mind and the like to language; rather, it is an ethnographic practice that attends to what is spoken, written, read, watched, and so on as doings, as embodied, as occurring, active in coordinating people's consciousnesses and, hence, as it is itself coordinated with other doings whether in language or not. Here is where discourse in Michel Foucault's sense becomes useful; discourse, as he used the term, is applied to standardized, generalized, and generalizing forms of making statements. Institutional ethnography activates his concept, introducing the presence of people and how discourse coordinates their doings (whether in language or not). For institutional ethnography, there are always people whose work orients through texts to futures, pasts, and elsewheres and to others we may never encounter other than through their written words or their imaging.

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