Hva jeg fikk til med institusjonell etnografi – og hva jeg ikke fikk til

Abstract

In this chapter, I give an account of my experience using institutional ethnography (IE). IE is a sociological approach that provides methodological and analytical tools throughout the whole research process. The basic goal for researchers who employ IE is to describe and explain how institutions shape people’s everyday experiences. In turn, such experiences serve as a window into the institution – they are a means to learn about the institution itself. Certain parts of the framework, such as work knowledge, institutional capture, mapmaking, and standpoint have been particularly useful for me. I believe IE helped me to discover patterns in my empirical material that I otherwise would not have seen – such as how variation in the interview data is connected to the institutional setting. In the final stages of the project, and in later research, I have not used IE as explicitly, but it continues to work as an analytic lens that reminds me to search for the connections between local experience and more general institutional processes. I conclude the chapter with a discussion about the ways in which IE is particularly well suited for research on the interaction between professionals and users in a welfare state setting.