Institutional Ethnography (IE), Texts and the Materiality of the Social

Abstract

Institutional ethnography (IE) explicates puzzles that people confront in their everyday experiences. In this approach, the social is understood to be always brought into being by people's actions that are socially and purposefully organized. Texts are analysed as material components of social organization with the capacity to replicate in different settings concepts and language that shape local actions, coordinating people in local sites with others located elsewhere. There is ruling power in such social organization that as Dorothy Smith, IE's originator, says is put together by relations that extend vastly beyond the everyday. IE is a method of inquiry that discovers how ruling works, and texts are methodologically crucial for an institutional ethnographer's tracking and mapping of the institutionally designed social relations that rule social settings. This paper illustrates doing IE with an analytic sketch of nurses using hospital information systems.